The quality of the care you provide to your patients is important for them in so many ways. Of course you need to maintain a certain level of professionalism with patients, visitors, and the medical professionals you work with. But overlooking the importance of bedside manner in nursing reduces the quality of the care that you have taken an oath to provide to the patients under your care.

Doctors are often more focused on the conditions and symptoms that patients are suffering from and finding the appropriate course of treatment for those symptoms and conditions. Due to this situation, their genuine concern for patents is not always conveyed. This can result in patients not feeling as if they can or should discuss symptoms they are experiencing, possible questions they have, and the fears they are keeping to themselves with the doctor. Many people feel more comfortable sharing this information with a nurse who has a friendly bedside manner. Therefore it is vital that you remember the importance of having a good, friendly bedside manner. You may often be the only bridge between the doctors getting the information needed to treat the patient better, and a patient understanding that not fully disclosing these things can seriously affect the outcome of their treatment.

For patients suffering from serious illnesses or injuries, the level of bedside manner provided by the nursing professionals caring for them, often takes on a greater significance. Your beside manner is integral to the recovery process of your patients. Think about it from the standpoint of the patient. Coping with an illness or injury and the treatment they must undergo for recovery is a time filled with fear and stress. They may also be dealing with symptoms such as pain, shock, confusion, nausea, light headedness, stiffness, lessened or complete loss of mobility, and sleep and appetite changes. The level of fear and stress is often heightened when a patient is hospitalized for treatment. The unfamiliar settings of a hospital can be very distressing to patients who are stressed because they are sick, injured, or having surgery.

Treatments can be uncomfortable or even painful. Patients may perceive their conditions to be worse than they are and their prognosis dismal, and may keep these feelings to themselves. Patients can easily become overwhelmed by the fear and stress they are feeling and not hear or understand what the doctor is telling them about their condition, the recommended treatment, and the risks involved. This will increase a patient’s level of fear and stress which can worsen their condition and make it harder to treat them successfully. Family and friends may also increase a patient’s level of fear and stress. They are themselves confused and scared because their loved one is ill or injured. Without meaning to, they may transfer their fears, confusion, and stress onto the patient whose body is already struggling under the weight of a medical condition. In these situations, the importance of bedside manner in nursing cannot be overstated. Displaying a calm, friendly demeanor to patients and their families can reassure them and reduce their fears and stress.

Some people don’t have family or friends who can visit them while they are in the hospital. This can lead to a patient feeling lonely, sad, and isolated or cut off from the people and surroundings they know and their normal lives. This can cause appetitive and sleep difficulties and even reduce the effectiveness of pain medications for the patient feeling as if they are all alone. Taking the time to talk to patients and asking them questions helps them to feel that they are not alone. This also conveys to them that you care not just about doing your job to the best of your ability: but also about them. Knowing that someone cares can very often help further the recovery process even when present treatments do not seem to be working, or working fast enough.

But even when the condition is a terminal illness or disease such as Cancer and the prognosis is not a positive one, bedside manner is important for helping those patients to be as comfortable and at peace as possible. Your bedside manner will also mean a great deal to the family members who must come to grips with seeing a loved one so seriously ill and knowing the end is drawing near. This is probably the hardest part of nursing. But there is nothing nobler than ensuring that a person is given dignity, comfort, respect, and compassionate care as they transition away from this life.

Your bedside manner is important to the patients you care for in so many ways as a nursing professional. Never underestimate the power of a good bedside manner. Take steps so you do not forsake the oath you have taken to provide quality care to your patients. Remember the importance of bedside manner in nursing.

A map is not functional until you know where you are on it. Consultants that objectively view their current reality always find a way to reduce confusion and misalignment. Agreement with yourself and your clients about what is true right now—in your company, in your project, in your life—is critical for making clear headway.

Get a Grip

There’s an old saying: “what you resist, you’re stuck with.” I’ve noticed this is particularly true with creative consultants and their work. If you’re not clear what your current job really is and you’ve skipped doing a complete and thorough inventory, you’re going to have a hard time making things happen for your client.

“Real generosity toward the future
consists in giving all
to what is presen”.
- Albert Camus

What is your job, right now! What is the main priority today? It is seldom as obvious as you might think. You can best answer that one question by answering these six:

1) What are your current tasks? These may be physical actions you need to take right now about your commitments and responsibilities: phone calls, e-mails, converstations, errands, brainstorming ideas, and so on. Typically a busy consultant can have as much as one or two hundred of these to do.

2) What are your current projects? These are the outcomes you have agreed with yourself to achieve, remeber you are an independent professional and must keep your word to yourself. There’s no one setting your agenda, in fact you are being paid to set it. Now, which of these outcomes requires more than one action to complete. Most consultants have between thirty and one hundred of these.

3) What, exactly, are your current areas of responsibility? Most consultants have ten or fifteen, like staff development, asset management, planning oversight, customer service, etc. But you’re NOT running, nor are you responsible for the WHOLE company. Leave that to the owner or CEO.

4) How are your consulting responsibilities and your personal affairs going to be changing over the next year? I’ve found that the truly effective, high pound consultants I’ve known and worked with, have taken the time to mesh their work with their lives. You are a one person conglomerate, but also, a living-breathing human being that has ‘outside’ considerations for a well-rounded life. If you don’t consider consulting an extentsion of a real life, a flesh and blood existence, but rather, something altogether seperate, placed in a box called: ‘consulting work’, then you’ll fail most of the time and be very unhappy nearly all of the time.

5) How is this life I lead going to change over the next five years. This is the big picture question, the vision of how things should be, not necessarily how they will be, into the near future. Why is this important? Because, in the quest for the answer to our question above, namely, what is your job right now, we can get a nearly crystal clear answer when we extend our vision into a larger field. By this I mean, you can see if your current job selection is aiding you in your long-term visionary goal.

“It takes about ten years
to get used
to how old you are”.
– Unknown

If you ocmplete a thorough inventory of the ocmmitments, issues, and projects that currently exist in your ocnsultancy and life on earth, espeically in these six areas, you will have a good definition of your work. This isn’t easy stuff, I know. I’ve spent over fifteen hours just identifying my work on two mundane levels: current actions and projects. But wihtout doing these things I don’t feel prepared, nor am I prepared to have conversation with my clients.

It’s all very useful work, however, should I need to re-calibrate my job description or deal with needed changes along the way. So many people have just a vague desription or ‘feeling’ about what they want to do or be in the future. But without a reality based reference point of where they are, right now, they are like the Flying Dutchman, doomed to drift.

So, know where you are on the map, so you can determine if you need to turn right or left.

“Discipline does not mean suppression
and control, nor is it adjustment
to a pattern or ideology. It
maeans the mind sees
“what is” and learns from
“what is”.
– J. Krishnamurti