An Introduction to Psychological Care in Nursing and the Health Professions
Helena Priest
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0415429080
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Caring is at the core of what nurses and other health professionals do. But caring encompasses more than simply looking after people’s physical health needs. People requiring any health service will have psychological needs that affect their feelings, thoughts, and behaviour. Good psychological care can even help improve physical health outcomes.
An Introduction to Psychological Care in Nursing and the Health Professions explains and promotes the importance of psychological care for people when they become physically ill, giving a sound theoretical basis to ensure care is evidence-based. It encourages the reader to think about the effects of illness and disability on patients, and to understand what can be done to identify and minimise any difficulties they might be experiencing in these areas. The chapters cover:
- the meaning and elements of care and holistic care;
- a model of psychological care in practice;
- the personal qualities and skills of carers that best underpin psychological care delivery, and how these might be enhanced;
- the knowledge needed for effective psychological caregiving;
- psychological care as it might be practised in a range of health care settings.
This text contains key learning points, practical activities, reflective exercises and case illustrations. It is ideal for student and practising nurses, and health professionals who would like to improve their care for patients in this essential area.
appropriate intervention. This might include deciding that referral to other agencies is required. Rimon’s (1979) early work, from a psychologist’s perspective, provided more specificity and suggested that a nurse’s psychological role was to anticipate and meet emotional needs, to establish a relationship, to communicate, and to encourage self-reliance and independence. Specific interventions identified as part of this psychological role included explaining hospital routines, policies and
for care have previously been identified in the literature. Chipman (1991), for example, specifically identified meeting patients’ needs in a timely fashion as an important prerequisite for caring, and indeed the patients in Kent et al.’s (1996) study of unmet psychological needs identified the need for more staff time. However, what was apparent in this study was that the issue was not to do with lack of time but more to do with identifying and responding to needs at the appropriate time, the
that would look ludicrous perhaps, written down … you can’t possibly, you’d be documenting every working minute of the day. We noted, in Chapter 1, the general consensus that caring comprises instrumental and expressive elements, and intuitively, caring for psychological needs would seem to be most closely aligned with the expressive elements of care rather than with the instrumental or practical, task-focused elements. However, from the quotations above, it seems that certain elements of
water, and warmth, humans are not motivated to achieve the other needs (all of which Maslow deemed to be psychological in nature) appearing further up the hierarchy. Another explanation might be that patients do not particularly expect to experience a caring relationship with their nurses or other caregivers; they have primarily come into the health care system to gain help for their physical problems. Their immediate concerns are likely to be getting a diagnosis for their troubling symptoms, or
to allocate resources, promote patient choice, and to reduce NHS administration costs by, for example, abolishing Primary Care Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities, almost before they have had time to establish themselves and to provide stability for carers and patients alike in their experience of the health care system. Gordon (1991 cited in Staden 1998) was critical of the ‘invasion of the marketplace into the caring professions’ and feared that converting a human service into a commodity