Being a nurse has been my dream job and it’s something I have always wanted to pursue since my childhood days. I now have the golden opportunity to be a part of the medical fraternity and to save people’s lives and this has given me the chance to live my dream. Despite having my dream job, I am faced with a couple of challenges among them handling patients with different cultural and religious backgrounds from mine and where my opinion and my patient’s opinion might defer. Understanding a patient’s ethnic background, cultural ethnicity and accessing their needs, interests and goals is a major aspect in offering better medical attention to patients (Erickson & Blazer-Riley, 2012).
One day while I was at the hospital there was a Jewish lady, who had fallen down and broken her hip, required immediate attention was brought in and was assigned to me for urgent medical attention. Being a male nurse made my patient client approach a little difficult because of the different cultural perspective between me and my patient. Being a Jewish, the patient holds the cultural modesty that women are supposed to cover their head, arms and legs with clothing and male unless their own spouse are supposed to touch such parts of their body. The Jewish lady was reluctant to get medical attention from me being a male nurse since this was a violation of the Jewish cultural modesty. Acknowledging the Jewish cultural ethnicity and the wishes of the Jewish lady I was able to develop an effective therapeutic relationship between me and the patient (Erickson & Blazer-Riley, 2012).
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Starting a conversation between me and the patient was one of the key elements I used as it helped build a trust between us. For instance, I used some humor so as to create a calm environment between me and her. Through the conversation, I was able to assess her needs and I was able to convince her to allow me to attend to her. This even made me understand the act of trust building, emotional support among the patients, understanding patient’s perspectives, thus ensuring a calm and effective nurse-patient relationship.
Reference
Erickson, M., & Blazer-Riley, J. (2012). The Client-Nurse Relationship: A Helping Relationship. In Communications in Nursing (Seventh ed., pp. 16-31). St.Louis, Missouri: Elsevier Mosby.
