The Future of Nursing: Reflections of a Nurse Educator

[Lane Therrell FNP, MSN, RN, NP]

Golden thread and soft skills

The future of nursing parallels the future of medicine, which is bright with technological innovations. From robotics, telemedicine, smart sensors, artificial intelligence, gene editing and more, the game-changing technological advances available now and on the horizon promise incredible improvements in healthcare across the board. It's an exciting time to work in the biosciences. And it's also a time when clinicians and caregivers must remain vigilant in recalling the reason healthcare exists: To improve the lives of human beings.

Communication is the golden thread that ties future to present and past, and connects individuals to one another. Communication involving digital screens and online connections creates convenience and leverages time and money but it also changes the nature and dynamics of human connections. I believe technology has created a real and relevant need for genuine human contact, a revival of the art part of nursing.

In recent years other professions including medicine have formally acknowledged the value of "soft skills,” which include interpersonal communication. That's because interpersonal communication skills really aren't that "soft" after all. Communication skills are powerful, and mastering them can be just as rigorous, difficult, and demanding as learning other clinical nursing skills can be. There is an academic and technical rigor associated with communication skills that too often remains unrecognized in nursing. Nursing must treat soft skills as clinical skills that are worthy of development.

My perspective

Before I get too carried away, let me clarify my perspective. I entered nursing at midlife after a successful 20-year career in public relations for agriculture. I hold two master's degrees in two very different areas of inquiry—rhetoric and nursing—which gives me a truly multidisciplinary academic background. I bring a mature, holistic, mindset to my practice that embraces a full spectrum of thought and ideas. My perspective matches the ideals of advanced practice nursing and offers the kind of outside perspective that exposes insular thinking and promotes innovation. And because I've been academically trained to deliver instruction in communication and leadership, I can teach people how to communicate more effectively.

My diverse experience in classrooms and clinics has shown me that better communication translates into better nursing care. It has also brought to light a great opportunity, as I see it, for nurses at all levels of practice to improve their interpersonal communication skills.

The Patient-Centered Illusion

Patient. Centered. Care. Those three words when used together capture the essence of why I became a nurse. Yet, without effective interpersonal communication, patient-centered care is merely an illusion. In nursing, we perpetuate the illusion by failing to communicate effectively. Three ways this can happen are: 1) treating numbers instead of patients; 2) using words that separate patients from their health; 3) establishing plans of care for our patients instead of with our patients.

Treating numbers

At its core, patient-centered care is built on individual conversations between patients and providers of care. These conversations allow us to treat the patient, not the numbers. Too often, though we become so heavily invested in counting quality measures or improving patient satisfaction scores, that we forget to check in with the actual patient. We even get tempted to use lab results alone to develop care plans, short-circuiting full patient assessment.

Delivering care that is truly patient-centered means addressing the needs of the individual in front of you, not blindly following an algorithm. Ultimately, no matter how advanced the technology becomes, the best way to discover what is going on with our patients is through careful assessments, focused conversations, and critical thinking.

Disempowering words

Consider how we use our medical vocabulary. Indeed, medical terms have a place, and we must communicate accurately and collaborate effectively with our highly educated colleagues. But we also must use words with our patients that are appropriate and easy to understand.

Words that are unfamiliar or unsupportive to our patients can create and perpetuate gaps in understanding, and contribute to feelings of helplessness and lack of control. Any type of disempowering language in a clinical setting leaves patients disconnected from their health and disengaged from their health behaviors.

Planning in a vacuum

Too often we are guilty of establishing plans of care for our patients instead of with our patients. If the plan of care is not relevant to the patient, and they're not invested in it, they won't honor it. This goes beyond "teach back" all the way to buy-in. If the patient can't tell you step by step what he's going to do to honor the plan between now and when you see him next, he likely won't.

As an educator, I work hard to make abstract concepts relevant to my students. I tell them why it matters, and relate it to something they already know so they can remember and "own" the information. We must all do the same with our patients if we want them to engage and comply with their plans of care. The teaching aspect of patient education is not about reciting massive amounts of information to patients, it's about making any new concepts and information relevant to their daily lives so they can own the plan and take appropriate informed action for themselves between visits. But we'll never know what's relevant to the patient if we don't have a meaningful conversation first.

Barrier, value, and taking action

The biggest barrier to improving interpersonal communication in nursing is thinking we've already mastered it. We talk about effective communication a great deal, and we're communicating all day every day, so we think we already know how to do it. But are we doing it well? Most of us are blind to the fact that we're not being effective. And we're missing an opportunity to teach interpersonal communication as a skill in nursing.

Effective communication is so much more than delivering information to a patient in their native language, following APA style to the letter when writing a term paper, or composing a persuasive letter to a legislator. All of this is important, but interpersonal communication skills are worthy of close academic scrutiny.

To break the barrier, nursing must value interpersonal communication as a skill and teach it as one. It's not that we don't value interpersonal communication at all in nursing, it's that we don't formally recognize it as a skill to be taught. If we did, we'd have communication labs the same way we have health assessment labs.

What if nursing did treat interpersonal communication skills with the intellectual and clinical practical heft I think they deserve? I believe nursing would thrive, improve, and facilitate the delivery of true patient-centered care in an age of booming technology.

The bottom line is: Communication skills are as important as clinical nursing skills. Without them, empathy cannot be expressed, ethics cannot be honored, and a true patient-centered environment cannot be created.

What are we doing to support nursing students' mastery of the skills underlying our target competencies and course objectives? Effective communication is the unnamed skill that supports virtually all the advanced practice competencies. And yet, who is teaching these fundamental skills to nursing students actively and experientially?

Future benefits

Advances in biomedical science are happening faster than the slow-moving wheels of academia and clinical practice can turn. Fortunately, effective interpersonal communication happens in real time and moves at the patient's pace. Effective interpersonal communication is the single best mechanism I know for meeting patients where they are on their individual continuum of change. From that perspective, what could be more patient-centered than engaging in interpersonal communication?

The best strategy for keeping healthcare patient-centric in response to technological integration is improving interpersonal communication skills. Communication skills improvement has great potential to improve outcomes in primary, pediatric, and geriatric care, among cancer survivors, and in any situation that involves patients with multiple chronic comorbidities. It is a topic that nursing scholars and doctoral candidates may wish to tackle.

Nursing is both art and science. While our education and industry may be biased toward science, it's the art part that keeps us focused on our purpose and our patients. I infuse this ideal into all my interactions with students, patients, and clients. And I leverage my background in communication to do so. I celebrate nursing for the connections it allows me to create with others. And as professionals, we can strengthen those connections by improving our communication. I challenge my fellow nurses to begin valuing communication more highly for the good of the future of nursing, and for the good of the patients we serve.

No matter what technology emerges in the future, there will always be a need for nurses to connect with patients as they deliver quality care. The future of nursing holds great possibilities and opportunities which we can embrace by integrating effective interpersonal communication into everything we do.

Article Sources:

5 Key Trends for the Future of Healthcare

Communication in Nursing Practice

Effective Communication Skills in Nursing Practice

Effective Interpersonal Communication: A Practical Guide to Improve Your Life

Integrating the Art and Science of Medical Practice: Innovations in Teaching Medical Communication Skills

Nursing Students' Perceptions of Soft Skills Training in Ghana

The Most Important Soft Skills Employers Seek

The Art and Science of Nursing: Similarities, Differences, and Relations

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