Good Relations between Nurses and Patients: Spreading the Wings of Imagination, Protecting Patients’ Souls

Patient satisfaction in facilities such as hospitals is related to the quality of nursing care and should be emphasized. And entering into patients’ subtle emotions, a sub-service not directly reflected in patients’ fees, exerts an influence on patient satisfaction. In fact, the sustainability of patient satisfaction is essential to the continuation of medical institutions. And nurses bear a central role in healthcare teams in influencing patient satisfaction and are part of a comprehensive medical system, while processes and structural factors affect the degree of patient satisfaction regarding nursing care.

In this study, the authors aimed to ascertain a method for building good nurse-patient relations from the narratives of veteran nurses who have accumulated profound nursing experience, and to show these phenomena in model form.

The authors conducted an interview with the participant concerning a specific mode of involvement that satisfactorily preserves nurse-patient relations. An approximately 50-minute session, featuring open discussion of the theme was carried out. The entire narrative obtained was set down in verbatim records. With the focus laid on the veteran nurse’s mode of involvement with patients, qualitative, inductive analysis was performed, and the results displayed in a modeling diagram.

Veteran nurses, utilizing their nursing specialization, showed “Concern as humans”, transcending their professional specialty. This was expressed as “spreading the wings of imagination” in order to know what is important to patients, and “protecting souls” in order to defend, together with patients, what is most important to the latter. “Spreading the wings of imagination to protect patients’ souls” became the key to build good nurse-patient relations.

In conclusion, nurses with deep experience expressed building good nurse-patient relations as “spreading the wings of imagination and protecting patients’ souls”. The building by veteran nurses of good nurse-patient relations depends not only on the length of clinical experience, but also on a deepening of nursing practice. In this way, nursing practice that uses sensitivity can be understood as one manifestation of nursing conduct.

Article by Mayumi Uno and Yukari Katayama, from Japan.

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Image by Dana Arena, from Flickr-cc.