Communication and Influencing Factors (Nursing)

00:01 Welcome to therapeutic communication in psychiatric nursing.

00:06 What is communication? It's the interaction between people where each person is able to transmit and receive messages.

00:16 It's an exchange of ideas and thoughts. But the message needs to be clear in that delivery.

00:27 The messenger must have common vocabulary that can be understood by the receiver.

00:35 What do we mean by that? I need to know that what I am saying to you today is being understood.

00:43 In fact, if I use a word that I think, perhaps, might not be in your vocabulary, I will add a second or a third word that will clarify.

00:55 So that messenger must have a common vocabulary so that the receiver will understand what is being said.

01:04 The receiver has to be accepting the communication. Must be listening and hearing.

01:10 There should be a way to establish the message and understand that what was heard was what was sent, in other words, that the message is received the way the messenger meant it.

01:28 That seems to be all very well and good, but in these few ideas, I'm sure you can think of times where you said something that you thought was understood by someone else, but that person didn't correctly get what you were saying and perhaps didn't do what you asked to be done.

01:51 In psychiatric nursing this is a real problem.

01:56 We have to make sure that we are receiving the messages that our patients are giving us, and also that when we are giving messages to our patients that our patients are understanding clearly, what we are saying.

02:11 So what are some of the factors that could influence communication? One is personal. What do I mean by personal factors? Well, your values for example.

02:25 If I say something that goes against your values, there's a good chance that you're going to stop listening to the rest of my sentence.

02:33 You're going to start thinking about what I said instead of listening to what I am saying.

02:39 Attitudes. If you have an attitude or I have an attitude, that's going to interfere with the message actually being delivered and received.

02:51 Beliefs. If what I'm telling you goes against your beliefs, you might actually look like you're listening to me and be shaking your head like this and if I am speaking to someone who is shaking their head like this, I'm going to find another way to deliver that message because that headshake is telling me, uh-huh, don't, don't agree, and can't agree, I can't see it.

03:20 Oftentimes, our values, our attitudes and our beliefs come out of the culture that we had been raised in.

03:31 Now each of us have our own culture, and so that actually gets in the way of hearing what's being said.

03:43 Religion is another way that it can influence our communication.

03:50 Our gender and the perception of another person's gender, and our attitudes towards gender can influence our communication.

04:03 Our social status. There have been more than once that I have met somebody in my life that felt that I was not in their social strata.

04:15 And so they would kind of, "Maybe you understand what I'm saying, but maybe you don't," and I found that very insulting and so I didn't want to listen to what they were saying.

04:29 When we allow social status to influence communication we break communication.

04:37 Age is another factor. If you have any ideas about a young person or an old person; if you think that a child can't have really good, significant ideas, then that's going to interfere with you being able to communicate with them.

04:57 Environmentally, here are a couple of factors to keep in mind.

05:01 Distance. Are you intimate with someone where you can be close to them and the distance doesn't bother you that you can be right next to them? Are you a personal friend where you have the personal distance that works for you? Is it a social gathering where they are able to come in to your social distance here that would normally just be for you? Are you in public, where you expect a little bit more distance between you and the people you're talking to? You have to keep in mind how dense is the room with people, so that the distance between you and other people are going to - it will be impacted by the density of the number of the people who are in that room.

05:51 And, also, the territorial idea of your space.

05:56 Are you the owner of the space that you are in? Or, are you part of a group where someone else is managing and saying, "Okay, you take a step to your left, you take a step to your right, you come a little bit closer." And so therefore, territorially, in that point, I wouldn't be able to keep my own distance.

06:19 I usually say to people, for communication, if you are not comfortable with someone being closer than your arms distance, this is probably, territorially, where you are most comfortable.