Throughout this past semester, as I completed my first clinical rotation experience, I learned what it meant to be a compassionate nurse. For most individuals, they find it hard to imagine themselves in a patient’s situation, but for nurses that perspective is achieved daily. This is where empathy comes into play, nurses are able to understand their patients and put themselves in the patient’s point of view. Each shift that I attended I would ask myself, “would I like this done to myself this way,” and that was when I would feel the power of empathy.
It was a typical Tuesday afternoon for myself at New England Rehabilitation Hospital and I expected the day to be like any other day. But, little did I know I was going to meet a patient that would give me a whole new perspective on nursing that day. This patient was older, 70-80 years old, and completely incontinent. As for any incontinent patient, they can suffer from a number of different issues related to their incontinence such as, anxiety, embarrassment, and just a general negative attitude towards their quality of life. I knew what I had learned from the PowerPoint presentations in class, what the “text” version of a patient’s quality of life is when they are incontinent, but in this moment, it was real, and nothing was to be read or taught in an academic way.
My patient had just had an accident in their bed, which is when I was informed by my clinical instructor that my role was to provide care and comfort for them in that moment. This was a situation I had never experienced before and was not even sure of the supplies and products that were needed. Upon meeting my patient, I prepared myself for the worst but still kept a smile on my face and ignored the smell that filled the hallway. That first moment when I thought to myself, smile and ignore the smell, was the first sign to me on what nursing encompasses. It was the first sign of empathy coming out, because I knew that if that were me, I would want my nurse to smile as well and make me feel the most comfortable.
My patient needed an entire brief change along with a new bed pad, and they knew it as well, which filled the air with embarrassment. At that moment I knew what it was like to be a nurse, student nurse in my case, because all my patient wanted was to not be incontinent and most importantly to be clean. I was immediately able to put myself in their situation and grasp their perspective, and as I did this, I felt myself becoming embarrassed as I thought about how I would want to be treated if I had just had an accident. I reached out to the other nurses on the unit and figured out what was needed in supplies to clean up my patient. The nurses were very proud of me for being so headstrong in this situation. As I began the cleaning process on my patient, I was so focused on providing the best care I could, that I soon realized we were both there in silence not speaking to each other. I felt that the silence was causing more embarrassment upon my patient and I immediately began to have a conversation, saying how beautiful it was outside today. That broke the ice and my patient started talking, but it was not just any conversation, my patient was explaining to me that they had never experienced a nurse provide such comforting care nor had they felt that the previous nurses had been so comfortable in that situation and you are only a student nurse. This conversation struck me because from my point of view I knew I needed to be as empathetic as I could for my patient, but they explained to me that most nurses would make faces at the smell, not smile, not be happy, and not provide comforting care for that matter.
Hugging myself, I thought about how proud I was for being able to empathize with my patient and provide the best care I could and knew that I was in the right direction for my nursing care in the future. Now that I have had time to reflect on that day, I realized that, I could have improved the situation by talking with the patient sooner, this was a minor setback and we were able to have a wonderful conversation. By the end of our conversation about nursing care I quickly realized how important it was to always look at a situation with a smile no matter what the circumstance may be, and to put myself in their shoes–to be empathetic. I figured out that to empathize was one of the biggest nursing concepts to understand and that I needed to incorporate these behaviors in all my future work for the patients and their quality of care. I could only wish that all nurses would provide the same care as I did for my patient but unfortunately it is just too unrealistic.
Watson, an internationally renowned nursing theorist, develop a theory of the factors that focused on the ‘care’ in nursing versus the ‘cure’ of medicine. As defined in Watson’s Carative factors, the expanded views of the self and person as being a unity of body and to care and promote healing were strongly presented in my clinical experience. Of the original ten Carative factors outlined, number three was the strongest presented, “…cultivation of sensitivity to one’s self and to others.” The sensitivity to my patient that I presented was empathy in the development of improving their circumstances. I was able to go beyond my perspective and put myself in my patients’ shoes to be able to predict how they felt and what they would need to limit those feelings of embarrassment and anxiety. Part of this involved pushing my negative feelings to the side and have a more positive outlook by taking each step at a time and ensuring that my patient knew I did not mind completing this care. By not minding completing this care it makes the client outcome much more positive and more compliant with the nurse. This put me in a teaching-learning process where I was able to learn from the nurses what supplies I needed and then I was able to teach myself the best way to provide incontinent care on an immobile patient. As a future nurse I already can predict I will have so many more experiences along these lines which just makes me even more eager to finish my journey as a college student and become the registered nurse I have always wanted to be.
References
Watson, J. (1997). The theory of human caring: Retrospective and prospective. Nursing science quarterly, 10(1), 49-52.
