Therapeutic Nursing

This innovative text explores the ways in which self-awareness can be used as a practical tool for continuing professional development and practice improvement.

This ground-breaking book identifies the role of nursing in the healing process written from a practice perspective. The text provides a firm foundation for students in understanding what nursing is. I WOULD ENCOURAGE ALL NURSES, IN ANY SPECIALITY, TO READ THIS CLASSI TEXT. Nursing Times

First published in 1997, this volume responds to the rapidly developing fields of nursing and health care fields and explores the meaning of nursing and the nurse-patient relationship through looking at the effects of a nurse’s personality, approach and understanding as being therapeutic for the patient’s experience. Steven J. Ersser explores areas including the concept of nursing as therapy, the presence of nurses and the effect of nursing on patient outcome. His book is part of a new series of monographs offering up-to-date reports of recently completed research projects in the fields of nursing and health care. The aim of the series is to report studies that have relevance to contemporary nursing and health care practice. It will include reports of research into aspects of clinical nursing care, management and education. This book, along with the series, will be of interest to all nurses and health care workers, researchers, managers and educators in the field.

This volume deals with universal processes of therapeutic communication, a term which covers whatever exchange goes on between people who have a therapeutic intent, with an emphasis upon the empirical observation of the communicative process. -- Preface.

Awarded first place in the 2017 AJN Book of the Year Awards in Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing. This book introduces an innovative technique for therapeutic communication in mental health nursing, expanding the toolkit for nurses seeking to engage challenging patients who have not responded to more conventional therapeutic methods. Linking nursing communication to current research on metaphor and figuration, it is illustrated with accessible clinical examples. Metaphor is a key component of talk-based psychotherapies. But many of the patients whom nurses encounter in the inpatient setting are not good candidates for talk-based approaches, at least initially, because they are violent, withdrawn, highly regressed, or otherwise lacking a vocabulary to convey thoughts and feelings. This book offers specific clinical examples of an approach called the "gestural bridge." This is a method for structuring games and physical activities which connect metaphorically to a patient’s personal themes, activating narrative and observational agency and enabling an exchange of meaning to begin at a time when conventional language is not available. Rooted in what nursing theorists have called the "embodied" or "aesthetic" way of knowing, this approach is both specific and easily grasped. Drawing from contemporary work in literary theory, semiotics, metaphor theory, cognitive science, philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and the arts, Therapeutic Communication in Mental Health Nursing is important reading for advanced-level practitioners, students, and researchers interested in communication and relationship-building in nursing.

′I found the book to be fascinating and so thought provoking that it made me consider more carefully the text and prose to really understand what the author said. It is skilfully written, very readable and has implications for a wide range of people such as the undergraduate, practitioner, lecturer and researcher′ - Accident and Emergency Nursing Gaining self-awareness is a vital aspect of professional development for all who work in the caring professions. In nursing especially, the ability to evaluate oneself affects all areas of practice, including direct patient care, working relationships with colleagues and maintaining one′s own well-being in the often pressured environment of health care. This is an innovative text which explores the ways in which self-awareness can be used as a practical tool for continuing professional development and practice improvement. Divided into three parts, the book examines the role of the nurse as therapeutic practitioner, reflective learner and reflexive researcher. For all those wishing to develop their skills as autonomous, reflective, accountable practitioners, this book will be an inspiring read. It will be of immense use to those who teach and supervise nurses at all levels.

Nurses are at the front lines of communications with patients, supervisors, physicians and administration, and they can use the skills they have developed as nurses to add value to those communications. Williams (nursing, U. of Miami) and her contributors start with the idea that to be effective and therapeutic communicators, nurses must understand