The Relationship of Nurses’ Clinical Competence and Communication Skills with Parents' Anxiety during Neonates and Children's Hospitalization

Both clinical competence and communication skills of nursing staffs have been shown to play important roles in developing effective nurse/patient relationships. Here, we attempt to clarify whether the clinical comptenece and communication skills of nurses could improve the parents’ anxiety during the hospitalization of their neonate or child in pediatric centers in Booshehr province within the year of 2018.

In this cross-sectional, correlational study, the nurses were selected among those whom worked in pediatric, neonatal and pediatric emergency wards using the census sampling method and the parents were selected by convenience sampling method among those parents whose infant/child had been admitted to the pediatric centers in the Booshehr province within the year of 2018. The Nurse Competence Scale, Barton-J Communication Skills Scale, and STAI Anxiety Inventory tools were used to collect data and spss.V.19 software and Spearman correlation test were used in analysis.

The mean score of clinical competence, communication skills and parent anxiety were obtained 77.26 ± 12.81, 62.52 ± 8.42 and 86.74 ± 18.12, respectively. There was a significant inverse relationship between hospital rank of nurseschr('39') clinical competence and total anxiety score of parents (r = -0.363, p value <0.001). No significant relationship was observed between total communication skills of nurses and total anxiety score of parents (r = -0.102, p value = 0.223) but there was a significant inverse relationship between verbal skills category and total anxiety score (r = -0.217, p value = 0.010).

According to these findings, the higher the clinical competence and verbal communication skills of nurses, the lower the anxiety of parents of hospitalized children. By selecting qualified nurses with good verbal skills in the neonatal and pediatric wards, nursing managers can provide a basis to reduce the anxiety of parents which also helps nursing staffs to be more focused.