Journal of Nursing & Care

Teaching Communication to Nursing Students: Contemporary Perspectives on Practice

Abstract

Fiona Timmins, Catherine McCabe, Colin Griffiths, Madeline Gleeson and Joan O’Shea

Client-centred communication is an integral part of nursing and is the foundation stone for the provision of high quality nursing care. The success and effectiveness of the nurse-client relationship lies in the words and body language that nurses choose to use when providing client care. Increasingly attention is being given to the therapeutic relationship between the nurse and the client, rather than a discrete set of communication skills for given situations, it is proposed that client-centred communication is an integral part of nursing and is the foundation stone for the provision of high quality nursing care. The impetus for this paper arose due to similarities arising between four independent research studies conducted by the authors, and the resultant need to share these key themes as a basis for improving communication teaching to nursing students. The aim of this paper is to present a novel examination of a core aspect of the nursing curriculum across four strands of the profession with a view to eliciting key communication skills that underpin the profession of nursing. This combined approach to understanding communication assisted lecturers to both understand and teach communication skills to three disciplines of nursing. These four conjoint studies demonstrate how the deployment of finely honed communication skills is important in the development of the nurse client relationship and ultimately the achievement of high quality nursing care. The paper further aims are to use the combined results of these four studies to demonstrate important characteristics of nurse/client communication that is relevant and applicable to diverse areas of nursing and ought to be encouraged in teaching practice.