Background

Student Context

In 2016, immediately after my graduation, I started working as a qualified nurse in the Fahad Specialist Hospital located in Saudi Arabia. During the placement, I was responsible to work in the male specialist ward for three weeks under the assistance of specialist nurse to provide proper care to the patients. The training through assistance was helpful for me to become familiar with the way effective quality care is to be provided. My role in the hospital was to assess the patients after discharge to determine their experience during the stay in the hospital. In 2017, I began to work as a nursing teaching assistance in the nursing college of Bisha University located in Saudi Arabia. The role in this job was to provide practical classes to nursing students by assessing their strength and limitation in providing care and accomplish nursing duties.

Patient Group

The patient group mainly cared for during my tenure in the hospital are elderly patients who are 65 years of age and above suffering from mild to severe dementia. The common interactions which usually take place are determining the needs and demands of care of the patients and make the patients provide informed consent regarding care through non-verbal as well as verbal communication.

Nursing Communication

The non-verbal communication skills were more important for the context of providing care to elderly dementia patients because the patients were mostly seen unable to use proper words and phrases or form legible sentences to inform their needs and demands. The dementia patients are found to be unable to make proper verbal interaction because the disease has led their significant brain cells to be destroyed making them face issues with developing language (Hung et al. 2017). Thus, the non-verbal communication skills were particularly important in this content as through facial expression along with the use of signs as a nurse I was able to understand needs of the dementia patients as well as communicate with them the care action and therapeutic intervention to be provided for them. The non-verbal interaction is significant for the mentioned patient group because it helped me as a nurse to properly assess the mental and physical state of the patients. In addition, it helped to develop interpersonal communication with the patients to show them empathy and respect their dignity during the interaction. The verbal communication was used as additional interaction method with the family members of the patients to inform them regarding the health condition of the patients as well as gather detailed information regarding the patient and access feedback for the care satisfaction towards the individuals.

The dementia patients as a result of their forgetful behaviour, inability to communicate verbally and inefficiency to perform own tasks become a burden of care for the family. This leads the family members to treat them in an inappropriate way as they are unable to understand the feeling of the patients and manage their needs (Voss et al. 2018). Thus, communication skills are mainly important for caring of dementia patients as it helps to determine the feelings and emotions of the individuals to offer them effective care. In addition, dementia is considered in some cultural communities as shame in the society due to which the dementia patients are abused and harmed which lowers their dignity and self-esteem (Stubbe, 2017). This is because their emotions and feelings are not valued as well as they are rejected to be properly respected by society. Thus, communication skills are important for caring of the dementia patients so that through effective interaction the feelings and emotions of the individuals can be valued to improve self-esteem and respect the dignity of the patient. In addition, communication skills are important in dementia care to avoid error in care (Xanthopoulou et al. 2019). This is because communication helps the nurses to determine the needs and demands of patients based ion on which the care plan is developed by the nurses, in turn, avoid delivering wrong care that does not fulfil needs of the patient

Communication Skills

The good communication in nursing is referred to relay and interpretation of information between the nurses and patients along with interprofessional to deliver satisfactory care to the service users on the basis of their needs and demands (James and Caiazza, 2018). The therapeutic communication