By sumanOn

Importance of Positive Attitude for a Nurse:

Individuals’ behavioural responses are influenced by their attitudes. The following factors may contribute to the significance of the study of attitudes for nurses:

  • Patient Care -Prejudiced behaviour has a negative impact on patient care whenever there is a bad attitude about a race, a community, or an illness. Stereotypical ideas that a nurse may have formed in a previous sociocultural environment frequently lack a solid scientific foundation. These could cause her to act inappropriately, which would interfere with her ability to do her job.
  • The nurse should try to comprehend the patient’s attitude; • The nurse should be aware of her attitudes and avoid them from interfering with nursing treatment. While some patients arrive at the hospital with a good attitude, others don’t, typically because of prior hospital experiences.
  • To aid in therapy and recovery, the nurse should investigate the reasons behind these unfavourable views and work to change them. A nurse can accomplish this by administering effective care, having more expertise and if necessary, providing acceptable explanations.
  • The nurse must develop and build a professional attitude to succeed at work and in a statistical manner. These scales aim to evaluate an individual’s or a group’s feelings about something. The Likert scale is the most often used of these. The researchers use a unidimensional scale to assess the attitudes and opinions of respondents. It represents the total of all the Likert scale responses.
  • Simply said, a Likert item is a statement the respondent is asked to rate using one of the following statements: strongly agree, agree, do not know, disagree, or disagree strongly.

Psychometric assessment of emotions and attitude:

Attitudes cannot be seen directly; they can be gathered through forceful verbal and nonverbal behaviour. The following tools can be used to assess attitudes:

  1. Self-report methods and opinion surveys (public opinion polling): These surveys are focused on responses to certain questions where respondents are invited to react by expressing their individual opinions. To pinpoint the sources of a particular viewpoint, answers to such questions are separately collected. In the self-report approach, the respondent is given a questionnaire or a set of statements pertaining to the attitudinal objects. Responses can be given in a predetermined format, such as agree-disagree, like-dislike, or favourable-unfavourable, or they can be left open-ended so that respondents can use their own terms.

2. Scales of attitude Thurstone attitude scale, Likert scale, Guttman’s scalogram, and Osgood’s semantic differential type are a few examples of attitude scales that often produce a total score showing the direction and intensity of a person’s attitude toward an object, event, or class of stimuli.

3. Voluntary behavioural methods: This includes the utilisation of physiological tests. In the past, GS and the size of the pupil were used to assess arousal and assess attitudes. Since only the extreme of attitudes could be measured and no indication was given of the trend of attitudes, these were not very successful. The use of electromyography recordings from the main facial muscles to evaluate attitudes has just emerged, however it has not been confirmed.

Alterations in emotions during illness:

People respond to disease in different ways. The severity of the illness, the patient’s attitude toward it, how others respond to it, how visible the symptoms are, if a support system is available, economic factors, and the patient’s coping mechanisms all influence an individual’s emotional reactions.   Threatening sickness rarely causes significant emotional changes. Anxiety, shock, fear, wrath, denial, and depression are just a few of the more intense emotional reactions that can result from a severe disease, especially one that poses a serious risk of death.

  • Anxiety: Anxiety is a state of fear, uneasiness, agitation, worry, and uncertainty that people experience when they foresee risks. Some people experience anxiety because they are afraid of a potential diagnosis, an upcoming procedure, etc.
  • Worry A mild form of anxiety characterized by the preoccupation with problem. Separation from important individuals, a lack of privacy, a lack of knowledge of hospital language, and odd sights, sounds, and odours, among other things, are common anxiety-producing elements in the hospital setting.
  • Fear: Fear is a feeling of dread caused by anticipated bad things.
  • Shock: A reaction when a patient or their family is told they have a serious or life-threatening illness. They are aware of what has been stated, but they either don’t answer or do so in an inappropriate way.
  • Denial: Denial is a coping method used by a patient or their family to keep emotional conflict and worry at bay by refusing to accept challenging information. For example, a family that is aware that a member of theirs has cancer can try to downplay the diagnosis and carry on as usual. Denial in the short term can help a person cope with their sickness.
  • Anger: Anger is a feeling of irritation and struggles in response to a challenging or unpleasant event. The patient’s social or spiritual qualities may be impacted by anger.
  • Depression: Depression is an emotional condition that is characterised by hopelessness. It happens because of the lack of a cure or a loss of personal control.

Role of nurse in caring for emotionally sick client:

More than any other hospital employee, nurses spend the most time with patients, making them feel better to assess their psychological responses. They can understand their emotional requirements and prepare the best nursing interventions.

Nursing interventions include:

  • Spend Time with Patients
  • Listen while the patient is describing his feelings.
  • Try to identify what is frightening to the patient and offer appropriate explanations.
  • Facilitate Verbalization of Feelings:- Allow the patient to explore his emotions/ feelings. Verbalization often brings about a tremendous relief of tension.
  • Controlling Your Emotions
  • Tearfulness frequently follows the expression of pain verbally.   Every cry needs to be handled delicately, in private, and with support until calm is restored.
  • Even if the patient is angry at the nurse, tolerate the situation of the patient.
  • Try to identify the source of your anger before dealing with it.
  • Understand that a patient who engages in denial is doing so to protect himself from a situation he would rather avoid.
  • Handle denial with caution and in coordination with other medical staff.
  • Try to assist the patient in finding coping mechanisms, such as taking part in worthwhile activities.
  • Be respectful.
  • Patient Introduction to the Medical Facility:- Give the patient frequent assurances while giving them a thorough of explanation of patient care services for the various medical and nursing procedures they must undertake. The patient’s anxiety about the unknown will diminish as a result.
  • Identification of Patients’ Learning Needs:- It’s important to determine the patients’ educational needs. For example, a patient may worry about the prognosis, discomfort, mobility, dependency, etc. before surgery. Giving information on these topics will satisfy his desire to understand his condition and course of therapy, hence reducing his worry.
  • Offer a range of activities:- Encourage enjoyable and stress-relieving diversions while keeping the patient’s condition within acceptable bounds. Many people with chronic illnesses fail to identify their need for recreation. As patients move closer to independence, give them real and appropriate encouragement.
  • Taking Care of the Elimination Pattern, Food and Fluid Intake, and Insomnia
  • Take steps to encourage sleep, such as limiting environmental stimulation, eating light at night, doing activities during the day, reading books, and listening to music before bed.
  • Proper nutrition and fluid consumption must be ensured by nurses. Many depressed individuals show little interest in eating, which can cause a rapid deterioration in their nutritional health.
  • Provide food that is nutritional.
  • Frequently offer the patient modest, attractively presented amounts, and give them enough time to be consumed.
  • Maintain regular bowel movements because constipation is a typical complaint among individuals who are in discomfort.
  • Keep a positive attitude and humour: – Emotions in people can spread quickly. Patients prefer having staff members who are cheerful, professional, skilled, and sincere about their work. When used properly, humour may frequently reduce feelings of tension, stress, and anger while also fostering close bonds between people.
  • Seek out Professionals in Mental Health:- Patients should be aware that psychiatric interventions can provide relief if their sickness and emotional reactions cause major and persistent disruptions in their lifestyle and relationships with important persons. The community’s resources for mental health care should be described by nurses.

Summary:

  • The process of persistent behaviour directed towards a specific goal, which results from certain driving forces, is called motivation.
  • There are two types of motivation, namely, biological, and psychosocial motivation.
  • Biological motivation focuses on the innate, biological causes of motivation like hormones, neurotransmitters, brain structures (hypothalamus, limbic system), etc. Examples of biological motivation are hunger, thirst, and sex.
  • Psychosocial motivation explains motives resulting mainly from the interaction of the individual with his social environment. Examples of psychosocial motives are the need for affiliation, the need for achievement, curiosity and exploration, and the need for power.
  • Maslow arranged various human needs in ascending hierarchical order, beginning with the most basic physiological needs, and then safety needs, love and belongingness needs, esteem needs, and finally on the top of the hierarchy is the need for self-actualisation.
  • Other concepts related to motivation are frustration and conflicts.
  • Emotion is a complex pattern of arousal that involves physiological activation, conscious awareness of feeling, and a specific cognitive label that describes the process.
  • Certain emotions are basic like joy, anger, sorrow, surprise, fear, etc. Other emotions are experienced because of the combination of these emotions.
  • Central and autonomic nervous systems play a major role in regulating emotions.
  • Culture strongly influences the expression and interpretation of emotions.
  • Emotion is expressed through verbal and non-verbal channels.
  • It is important to manage emotions effectively to ensure physical and psychological well-being.

Reference:

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