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# 1 Post-Barriers to professional nurses when forming relationships with families.

As nurses, we must deal with many somewhat uncomfortable situations, and that requires a professional approach with the patient. In the community, we find a wide diversity of patients that bring along multiple barriers that are related to their cultural background and to the social upbringing depending on the regions where they were raised. These barriers affect the capability of professional nurses to establish productive relationships with the families in the communities. The population of my community is composed, in a great part, of immigrants. Being an immigrant poses a tremendous challenge for the families themselves and the nurses. Immigrants must deal with many obstacles regarding their healthcare access and their relationship with nurses.

The first obstacle I identify within the immigrant community is the language barrier. Communication is identified as the most important aspect of care provision and an essential component of a nurse’s professional role regardless of the clinical area or specialty. Language barriers have been identified as one of the biggest obstacles in providing adequate, appropriate, effective, and timely care to patients with limited English proficiency. The use of professional interpreters is considered useful; however, the limitations associated with the use of interpretation service, including arrangement difficulties, availability, and accessibility of interpreters, convenience, confidentiality, and privacy-related issues and impact on the patient’s comfort. Language barriers, in any country or setting, can negatively affect nurses’ ability to communicate effectively with their patients and thereby have a negative impact on the provision of appropriate, timely, safe, and effective care to meet patient’s needs (Ali & Watson 2018).

Another barrier that nurses have in forming an effective relationship with families is related to healthcare accessibility for immigrant communities. Immigrants are among the most vulnerable population groups in North America; they face multidimensional hurdles to obtain proper healthcare. Such barriers result in an increased risk of developing acute and chronic conditions. Subsequently, a great deal of burden is placed on the healthcare system. Community navigator programs are designed to provide culturally sensitive guidance to vulnerable populations to overcome barriers to accessing healthcare. Navigators are healthcare workers who support patients to obtain appropriate healthcare (Shommu et. al, 2016). In these programs, navigators train and guide members of several ethnic communities for chronic disease prevention and management, to undertake cancer screening as well as accessing primary healthcare.

The main conflict of interest I see for nurses that have to deal with immigrant communities is that sometimes the interaction with this population requires the nurses to go through additional training and education so they can deal with these particular situations of a language barrier and healthcare accessibility. Also, I think that a possible conflict of interest is that these barriers can impact negatively the ability of the nurses in the community to deal with their caseload and this adds up to their busy schedule. Immigrant communities require special attention from the healthcare team and especially from the nurses in the community since they are those who are really in the position to identify these barriers and take action to resolve or minimize their impact.

Post #2-

Forming Relationships with Families

Forming relationships with families can be difficult at times. Nurses are constantly interacting with the patient’s family members. With time and practice, we are able to better develop a rapport with families and are better able to communicate with them. Some potential barriers to forming effective relationships with families include differences in health beliefs, job problems, and difficulties with patients.

According to South University (2017), we can build rapport with patient’s families by communicating with them well and often, expressing empathy, and projecting calmness. Establishing an effective relationship with families is paramount in health care, this allows nurses and the entire inter-professional team to provide high-quality patient care. Nurses must keep in mind that the nurse-family relationship should begin when we first encounter these family members. This will allow us to develop our rapport with the patient’s families. But before we can build an effective relationship, we must overcome the barriers of the nurse-family relationship.

To begin with, having different health beliefs can affect the nurse-family relationship tremendously. As trained professionals, we are able to determine what the patient needs and what can help their condition. Unfortunately, at times patient’s family members don’t share the same health beliefs and this can damage the nurse-family relationship. In addition, the patient’s family members may feel that treatments are unfair and/or information can be miscommunicated, which can have a negative impact on the nurse-family relationship.

Moreover, job problems are another barrier that can impact the relationships that we have developed with patients’ families. At times our jobs can be stressful, frustrating and we can become tired of the heavy workload which can sometimes affect our attitudes. This attitude is something that patients and their families can detect in a matter of seconds and can affect the relationship we have built. On the other hand, members of our community can also detect shifts in our attitudes which can make us seem unapproachable, impeding us from building that relationship with our neighbors.

Lastly, difficulties with patients. Difficulties with other patients can affect our work tremendously. When nurses have that one difficult patient, it’s often hard to keep up with our other patients. Patients and their family members may misinterpret this as a lack of interest because they are not aware of what’s happening outside of their rooms. When we are faced with these situations it’s vital that we communicate with our patients and let them know that we are currently occupied, but you will be in to check on them or have another nurse check on them while we are occupied in another room. Communication between the nurse and patient’s family impacts the patients’ health as well as the quality of nursing care (Loghmani et al., 2014).