Many patients and their families have a mixed sense of hope, hesitation, anxiety, and other complicated emotions when visiting the psychiatric outpatient unit. Nurses interact with them with warmth and stability in order to make them feel safe and secure, with a sense of encouragement while they are at the hospital. The nurses also purposefully communicate with the patients and their families to establish a stable relationship and to gather information needed for treatment. For this purpose, nurses particularly value the perspective of “how they usually think and live,” not just how they are while they are at the hospital.
In psychiatric visiting care, the expected role of nurses had been “with importance placed on the severity of the condition, to provide problem-oriented management, guidance, and education, with the aim of improving the condition.” In contrast, in recent years, the role of nurses has shifted to “with importance placed on the individuals’sense of recovery, to focus on the strength that they can utilize and encourage them toward the goal that they have verbally expressed.” Today, we attempt to convey “individuality” and “strength” to patients rather than taking a critical attitude, to expand and present options for problem-solving in a form of news or suggestion instead of giving authoritarian “guidance.” Furthermore, we support trial-and-error rather than “educating,” through which we ultimately aim to establish a partnership and actualize the life patients hope for.
<Author's abstract>
Nursing: Outpatient Treatment and Outreach
Home-visit Nursing Station Mental Nagoya
Psychiatria et Neurologia Japonica
120: 521-528, 2018
<Keywords:multi-disciplinary team, psychiatric nursing, psychiatric outpatient, psychiatric visiting care, outreach>