Barriers in nurse- patient communication in Sri Lanka

: bachelor degree nursing students’ perspective

Abstract

Effective nurse-patient communication is an essential component for building a positive relationship between nurses and patients during their caring process. Many factors would affect as barriers for the nurse-patient communication and identification of these barriers will help to make the nurses and the relevant authorities aware and take necessary actions to overcome them. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate barriers in nurse-patient communication from bachelor degree nursing students’ perspective. The study was conducted using quantitative cross sectional approach and a selfadministered questionnaire. The questionnaire was developed and validated by the researcher. The questionnaire was found as an adequately valid (Cronbach’s alpha =0.71) and reliable (ICC= 0.98; kappa agreement > 0.7 for individual items) instrument with adequate level of acceptability and content validity. The validated questionnaire was administered to a sample of 300 bachelor degree nursing students of the Colombo Regional Centre of the Open University of Sri Lanka. According to the results, more than half of the sample had more confident in patient communication and it showed that care environment related factor of ‘complex nursing tasks’ (p= 0.030) and nurse-relatedfactor of ‘job related stress’ (p= 0.023) were barriers for nurse-patient communicationin Sri Lanka. Therefore, hospital management and other relevant authorities need totake actions to create the working environment as the nurses’ job related stress is minimized and supportive to deal with complex nursing tasks, in order to improve their communication skills with patients.