Effective Communication between Nurses and Advanced Cancer Patients

Abstract

The purpose of this descriptive qualitative research was to study effective communication between nurses and advanced cancer patients. The participants were selected by the purposive sampling and they were diagnosed with advanced cancer and admitted to Chonburi Cancer Hospital, and were assessed by the Palliative Performance Scale version 2 (PPS v2) and their scores showed ≤ 60%. Twenty participants were assigned. The semi-structure interview guide was used for collecting data. Then, the content analysis was applied to analyze these data.

The results revealed that the effective communication between nurses and advanced cancer patients emerged 4 significant categories: 1) characteristics of communication (: effective communication and non-effective communication), 2) characteristics of nurses contributing to the effective communication (: service-mind, encouragement, and creditable personality), 3) the barriers to communicate effectively causing from patients, nurses, loading work of nurses), and 4) effective communication improvement (: communication skills for psychological care and for explaining communication content) These results of this study demonstrated that the advanced cancer patients needed effective communication from nurses in both verbal and non-verbal communication. Nursing care has to eliminate the barriers to effective communication. At the same time, the communication skill promoting psychological care and content explanting for illness information needs to be developed and improved.