Best Practices -- Working with Families

patwil73 · Oct 14, 2009

Help! How do we get families to work with us for the best patient outcomes?

The long answer is you carefully assess your family to determine their skill level, knowledge level, comfort level, and willingness to engage in the practice necessary. You have to determine if they are in a place of enough comfort to be able to understand the directions you are giving and to comprehend the reasoning behind them. We have to understand that they might be scared, overwhelmed with other life problems, angry - and we have to be able to get past all that in order for effective teaching to take place.

Once we have we need to teach at their level. We need to find alternate ways to teach that get the idea across when our first attempts fail. We have to be willing to let them try and fail and to keep coming back with support and reinforcement.

Finally we have to understand that they are not professionals and probably will never do it just like we would - and that is ok.

The short answer is we may not.

Hope that helps

Pat

tewdles, RN · Oct 14, 2009

Simple answer:

1-make sure they understand what the desired outcomes are and why they are important

2-make sure that they are in agreement with desired outcome(s)

3-educate them as to the interventions or actions that will affect the outcomes (use the excellent advice previously posted)

4-reevaluate/re-educate ad nauseum