Stressed Out About Difficult Patients

Stressed Out About Difficult Patients provides practical, real world tips for nurses who are looking for help with challenging patients who may have psychiatric disorders or may simply be angry about being in the hospital.

As a new nurse, you have to build your communication skills in order to provide the best care and excel in your profession. This resourceful guide offers easy-to-use techniques that will change the way you interact with your colleagues to establish positive, healthy work relationships. Improved communication will enhance life for your peers, patients, and you!

Developed collaboratively by a doctor and nurse team, this is the first text to deal specifically with nursing difficult patients. Whether patient problems stem from mental distress and ill health, historic substance abuse, demanding family members or abusive behaviour, difficult patients place extra demands on nurses both professionally and personally. Caring for difficult patients requires both technical and interpersonal skills along with an ability to exercise power and set limits. This text presents invaluable practical recommendations and advice, well founded in experience and supported by relevant literature, for nurses coping with challenging, real world situations. Including learning points, further reading, case studies and dialogue examples to highlight good (and bad) practice, the book covers pertinent issues such as psychiatric diagnoses, setting limits and establishing authority, death and dying, stress and work. It is ideal for pre- and post-registration nurses, providing concrete direction on the management of difficult patients.

Developed collaboratively by a doctor and nurse team, this is the first text to deal specifically with nursing difficult patients. Whether patient problems stem from mental distress and ill health, historic substance abuse, demanding family members or abusive behaviour, difficult patients place extra demands on nurses both professionally and personally. Caring for difficult patients requires both technical and interpersonal skills along with an ability to exercise power and set limits. This text presents invaluable practical recommendations and advice, well founded in experience and supported by relevant literature, for nurses coping with challenging, real world situations. Including learning points, further reading, case studies and dialogue examples to highlight good (and bad) practice, the book covers pertinent issues such as psychiatric diagnoses, setting limits and establishing authority, death and dying, stress and work. It is ideal for pre- and post-registration nurses, providing concrete direction on the management of difficult patients.

One of the greatest challenges a nurse can face is to encounter what he or she perceives to be a 'difficult patient' or a difficult situation.

The need for renewal and support for those who care for seriously ill, dying, and bereaved people has been acknowledged from the very beginning of the hospice and palliative care movement. While often referring to the rewards and satisfactions of the work, Dame Cicely Saunders was the -first to acknowledge that helping encounters with dying patients and distressed relatives could be a source of anguish and grief for dedicated and compassionate carers. Caregiver Stress and Staff Support in Illness, Dying, and Bereavement discusses the challenge of finding a balance between the support needs of patients, families, and staff and the resources available. With contributions from practitioners and researchers from around the world, this book recognizes that palliative care today is being provided in many different settings and that there may be wide variations in the way individuals and organizations identify and manage the stressors that arise through the work. This unique collection of international perspectives on the complexities and management of caregiver stress and staff support builds on the firm foundation Mary Vachon built over thirty years ago in her studies, yet broadens the scope to include significant social, political, and cultural variations on the theme.

We are facing an epidemic of work stress. This study combines a critique of the scientific evidence relating to work stress, with an account of the social, historical and cultural changes that produced this phenomenon.