What Makes A Patient-Centered Care Important?

In nursing the quality of care we delivery is very important not just to the patient, but also the nurse. When we care for patients it is important to make the patients the priority and make their clinical experience a good one. A nurse usually develops their plan of care to satisfy the patients needs, so we call that patient-centered care. Dabney and Tzeng (2013) describes patient-centered care as a therapeutic relationship that occurs among health care providers and the patients that are receiving health care services, that is emphasized greatly on meeting each individual patients needs. Nurses have the ability to make patients feel like their care is individually based, because they have a greater presence in a patients care. In patient-centered
This is what makes the quality of care delivered so important. When caring for a patient in a clinical setting sometimes its easy to miss patients other needs besides the medical ones. In an experience brought up to my attention there was an incident when patient centered care was overlooked. It was when two 16 years old patent where first diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and had to have education to know about their disease and care by an RN. When educating them she was not considering the developmental stage of the patients or their emotional needs. She started by using big medical terms that where not understood by the patient and never stopped to clarify or ask if they patient understood. She then proceeded to talk about insulin as the only means of treating the diagnosis to the patient without any mention of any alternatives or changes that could help minimize the use of insulin. This terrified the patients making them cry because it was so bluntly mentioned that there was going to be use of insulin that included a syringe and self administration. As a mean of consolation the parents started to joke to keep the patients from crying. The RN proceeded to rudely ask the parents to stop
Their needs don't include just their physical needs, but also their emotional, spiritual, and other needs. I would deliver patient centered care by making sure my communication is appropriate for the situation, asking the patient what they want to accomplish, what can be incorporated into their plan of care that can help them with support, and what to prioritize in their needs to achieve good care. When caring for a patient I want them to feel like were on the same level and I am there to be their advocate, this helps them feel like its about them. Boykins states (2014) “a nurse should demonstrate qualities of mutual respect, compassion, and collaboration when communicating with the patient, family, and other health professionals regarding the patient's care and the nurse's role in providing care”(p. 42). I would further assure that I am using patient-centered care by making sure that I am demonstrating these qualities when interacting with a patient, because these are important to make your patient feel like their being cared for by a person that is competent. When demonstrating care I want to make sure I incorporate my patient and keep in mind that each patient has different characteristics that make their plan of care different. Overall to make sure that my care for my patients is patient centered the most important thing would be to ask them if my interaction with them was