Doctoral theses 2010_03_05 - Laszlo Papp

Szeged 2010 2 Introduction The task of nursing – according to its definition – is to help the healthly or sick person to perform those activities which contribute his or her health, healing or peaceful dying, and which he/she would done if he/she had enough strenght, will or knowledge to do so. During patient care, nurses need such knowledge and skills, which are eligible to handle the patient's occurent problems. Nurses must use these skills in a way which contributes in retrieving the sick persons' independency and self care. The fulfillment of this task is difficult, because during the last centuries, the healers/nurses took full responsibitily of the other persons life, which strongly influences the present day's health care too. At the same time, it could be said that among the receivers of health care, the passive " sick " role is quite common, and the patients expect their healing to come from " outer " sources, like nursing. Because of that, nowadays nurses must help patients to become more conscious users of health care services. The nurse becomes the sick person's or community's competent helper using his/her skills and abilities which he/she acquired during professional socialization. Beside objective knowledge and professional skills, the nurses' interpersonal competence is also a determing factor of the adequate role-fitting. The success of nursing activity is strongly defined by the success of interactions, because nurse-patient relationship's central role in nursing. The nurse acquires spontaneously some of the interactional skills he/she uses from everyday social relationships, but professional training has an important role in delivering such skills, by which the nurse could become a conscious person during interactions. Counselling is a common method of the helping professions, therefore the nursing too. Studies on nurses' counselling came to the front during the last decade. These studies usually deal with the nurse/patient relationship, the methods and implementation of counselling, and the activity's effect and significance. The educational issues are another similarly common theme in counselling research. Despite of numerous studies on the topic, there are only few high-level evidences, which show what skills nurses use during counselling, how they acquire them and how could its adequacy be measured. Nevertheless studies on nurses' counselling are rare, despite the fact that the use of the activity is regulated by the Hungarian Law on Health's Act 98. 3 During our literature review, we had faced a lot of unanswered questions, …