Nurse's Self-Assessment of Knowledge and Performance about Communicating with Patients Having Communication Problems

Making a good relationship between nurses and patients with communicational problems is difficult; however, insufficient studies are available in this regard. Hence,this cross-sectional study was conducted to evaluate the nurse's opinions on their knowledge and practice about communicating with patients having communicational problems in Kashan hospitals in 2012.. In total 200 nurses participated in the study and completed a questionnaire to evaluate their knowledge and performance. In addition, the questionnaire had 4 parts and was consisted of 22 questions on demographics, knowledge, and self-rating of knowledge and performance in communicating between the nurses and patients with communicational problems, and questions on common ways of communicating, common problems and reasons for insufficient skills in this regard. Data analysis was done using 11.5th-version SPSS software and descriptive statistics, t-test and ANOVA. The mean score of nurses’ knowledge on communicating with patients was 3.56±1.04 out of 5; moreover, no significant difference was observed between the mean of knowledge in female (3.55±1.05) and male nurses (3.62±1.03) (p=0.7). Subsequently, no significant difference was indicated between the mean of knowledge of nurses in medical-surgical (3.55±1.04), emergency (3.48±1.09) and critical care (3.72±0.98) units (p=0.69); furthermore, 79.5% of nurses mentioned their knowledge and performance on communicating with the patients having communicational problems as un-desirable. Nurses’ knowledge on communicating with those patients having communication problems was at the moderate level; they also evaluated their performance in this regard as unfavorable.Therefore, it is recommended that courses on special communicational skills should be established for nurses and also these topics be added to the curriculum of nursing at Bachelor of sciences degree.