Care expressed and practiced in professional nursing models provides a way of looking at the nursing role from the aspect of care. It may seem excessive to consider aspects of caring and compassion in nursing. However, precisely because it IS nursing makes it crucial to our continual progress of defining and upholding one of our central professional principles.
Address each of these items:
Reflect on a caring and compassionate experience with a patient or family encountered in your practice.
How was your compassion demonstrated?
How does your thinking about compassion expand to include self and colleagues?
Also write a reponse to the following peer’s post:
An example of how my compassion was demonstrated was seen when in conducting rounds on the trauma patients admitted to the hospital, I encountered a patient in his 40’s who had been in a motor vehicle accident and had sustained compression fractures to his lower back. His wife was at his side and after introducing myself, I began by asking how he was feeling and was his pain being well controlled. During the discussion, I was able to answer several of his questions about his condition as well as what things were important to consider in his recovery. Little things such as how he could turn and raise to a sitting position in the bed and transfer to a chair were very important to him. I believe that sympathy is feeling for, empathy is feeling with, and compassion is a deeper commitment in that we suffer with the patient by mentally putting ourselves in their situation as best we are able to do so. We can do this by listening and performing a quick meditation. What I mean by this is personalizing and visualizing us going through the same thing as the patient. According to American Nurses Association, “Human caring involves presence, empathy, values, knowledge, caring actions, acceptance of consequences, a will, and a commitment to care.” (2022)
This concept of meditation has helped me in the past not only with patients, but with myself as well. Taking the time to listen to the patients and ourselves leads to a better understanding of what the patient is experiencing and opens insights as to ways we can provide comfort and caring. He was having difficulty figuring out how he could urinate using the urinal and I was able to advise him a couple of different ways involving recumbent positioning as well as turning on his side. That may seem a small thing to most, but if you are the one lying in the bed with compression fractures or any other malady, it becomes a bigger problem than you would otherwise experience without having an illness or physical deficit now being present in your life.
In the “I Care Assessment”, an insight that was discovered is the value of having personally experienced similar situations as the patient. I was hospitalized for seven months after having several cardiac arrests back in 2013. This was a trying time and that is when I discovered the value of going through similar situations as my patients experienced. It helped to shape my concepts of caring and increased my compassionate responses in more effective ways because of the insights gained through those experiences.
Overall, it seems that things we might consider trivial or small in nature in terms of impact on the patient, are quite valuable in providing care than transcends are that is dependent solely on clinical nursing skills alone. Things like empathy, small acts, body language, and communication are all qualities of a compassionate caring nurse (Shibboleth Authentication Request, n.d.).
