Collaborate with patient to determine strategies to meet patient's needs for privacy to promote self-care, self-esteem, and decision-making.- Provide information proactively in anticipation of patient's needs, as well as upon request by patient. Encourage patient to ask questions and provide meaningful answers to them to promote psychological readiness to make a decision, self-esteem, and confidence in knowledge.
- Avoid the use of technical terms when at all possible; explain the meaning of technical terms when they must be used in communication with or in the presence of the patient to prevent a perceived power differential, which can be a barrier to patient understanding and self-esteem and impede the therapeutic relationship.
- Ensure that communications and information provided are at a level consistent with patient's cognitive abilities to ensure understanding.
- Promote self-esteem through active listening, validation of concerns, knowledge and feelings, conveyance of respect for patient's values, beliefs, and preferences to promote psychological readiness to make a decision and to strengthen the therapeutic relationship.
- Use active listening to identify and reflect back to patient the opinions of choices available to patient to promote autonomous consideration of options the patient and confidence in own opinions.
- Ask patient to verbalize what lifestyle, social, and other factors patient needs to consider in making a decision, and how these would impact or be impacted by the health care choices available to the patient to promote consideration of the context of patient's decision-making.
- Ask patient about strategies used in the past to make decisions. Validate patient's past choices in strategies. Engage patient in realistic appraisal of the applicability of past strategies to current situation to identify and draw on personal experiences and strengths in decision-making.
Teach patient about the utility of problem-solving frameworks to assist in decision-making. As desired, ask patient to use a problem-solving framework to identify and to evaluate the possible choices available. Ask patient to list the advantages and drawbacks to each choice, as well as personal values, goals, and preferences related to each choice. Encourage patient to identify personal and social barriers to enacting any of the choices. Then ask patient to rate the suitability of each choice based on patient's appraisal of each one. Use of a problem-solving framework in consideration of health care choices encourages the patient to consider health care options from the context of own experience and to identify own best choices given the patient's life situation.- As needed, assist patient to practice assertive expression of opinions. Encourage the patient to communicate in a way that is authentic, and simultaneously respectful of own feelings, values, beliefs, and wishes, as well as those of others. Assertive expression of opinions promotes self-esteem within and after interpersonal interactions.
- Role playing assertive expression of opinions may be helpful to prepare patient to do so in real-life situations. Role play can be an effective strategy toward the development of skill mastery.
Suggested NIC Interventions
Active Listening; Assertiveness Training; Decision-Making Support; Learning Facilitation; Mutual Goal Setting |