Nursing CE: What You Can Learn About Communication

• Communication is a soft skill that can help improve the results you get at work.
• Learning the basics of interacting well with others can also make your professional relationships better.
• Discover what our nursing CE teaches on how to be a better listener and delegator, the importance of empathy, and what stops good conversations from happening.

Effective communication skills can help you succeed in any professional setting. Optimizing your interactions with coworkers and patients can improve results for everyone involved. Remember, nobody is a true team of one, so you’ll need to reach out to others sooner or later. This is why learning how to talk to people the right way is essential.

To get the most from any conversation, you need to know how to have a successful one. In this article, we’ve outlined skills taught in our nursing CE courses to help you conduct workplace discussions well.

Improve Your Listening Skills

Do you listen well to others? If you wait for conversation pauses to get your point across, you could use some work in this area, as not paying attention to the other person could result in confusion.

Here are a few listening skills to develop:

• Don’t interrupt the individual you’re talking to.
• Eliminate all distractions and give the other person your full attention.
• Repeat what they said to you to ensure you understand what was said. Try saying, “What I heard you said is…”
• Use follow-up questions to deepen your interpretation of the conversation. Try saying, “Tell me more,” or “Is there more you want to share?”
• Show empathy for them by saying, “I can understand how that feels.”

To learn more about this topic, visit our A Nurses Guide: How to Deal with Difficult Patients nursing CE page.

Try Therapeutic Communication

Compassionate communication can be healing to a patient. When a nurse shows that they care, positive outcomes follow, and one impact of this relating is stress reduction. These conversations have no drawbacks; they show the patient that their results are important to you and that you see them as human beings, not just tasks to take care of.

Here are a few therapeutic communication tips to consider:

• Think before you speak.
• Try to provide comfort.
• Use uplifting and energizing words.
• Exhibit friendly body language.

Visit our therapeutic communication nursing CE blog post to learn more.

Avoid Inappropriate Communication 

Some ways of talking to people are inappropriate in the workplace. These conversations may make the other person uncomfortable and do not foster a healthy work environment.

Although the following list isn’t exhaustive, it does include a baseline of actions to avoid.

Verbal abuse: Examples of this behavior are rudeness, criticism, belittlement, and threats. Replace these actions with kindness, appreciation, acknowledgment, and consideration.

Controlling: This behavior includes micromanaging, giving unsolicited advice, and aggressive body language. Replace those actions with allowing autonomy and friendly non-verbal cues.

Ignoring: Some of these actions include intentionally ignoring requests and suggestions. Replace those behaviors with maintaining an open-door policy and a willingness to listen to the other person’s point of view.

To learn more about communication styles to avoid in professional settings, visit our Bullying in Nursing CE page.

Barriers to Communication

Anything that stops a message from being understood correctly is a barrier. In the nursing world, this can impact patient care. While many things can impede a conversation, here are two that directly relate to communication:

Language: This occurs when people don’t speak the same language or if one person has a physical language disability. This barrier can be overcome with the use of an interpreter.

Cultural: This happens when the way someone expresses themselves is considered offensive in another culture. These incidents can be reduced by learning more about the patient’s societal beliefs.

To learn more about this subject, visit our Effective Communication nursing CE page.

How to Delegate

Knowing when and how to ask a coworker to perform a task is an important skill. Here are a few things to consider to make that process more successful:

Is this the right person for the job? – Is this task within the nurse’s scope of work?

Is this the right task for the nurse? – Do they have the skillset to complete the task?

Are these the right circumstances to delegate the task? – Does the nurse have the time to complete the job?

Have you given the right directions for the assignment? – Were your directions clear and leave no room for misunderstanding?

Is the right supervision available for the job? – Does this person need someone to overlook them while performing this task?

To learn about this topic, visit our Delegation nursing CE blog post.

The Bottom Line

Improving your communication skills is a worthy goal that will pay dividends at work. Learning to listen, delegate, and become empathetic is part of the process. How you approach a conversation is just as important as the content of it. Nursing CEs are a tool that can be used to help foster growth in this area.

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