Patient and Family Involvement Understanding of the patient as a person in healthcare facilities is a crucial aspect that helps the patients and their families in making daily continuing care decisions. Therefore, communication skills are very essential in facilitating effective contribution of nurses in the process of discharge planning. The information regarding facts and feelings of the patients are gathered and organized into an assessment of the needs of the patient after which such needs are communicated to members of the medical team (Watts & Gardner, 2005). Receipt of information is always a major gap in the communication among the healthcare professionals. Information relating to diagnosis, prognosis, as well as self-care ability always exhibit deficiencies making discharge planning difficult. Most of the patients who are readmitted to the hospital after discharge claim that they were not asked about their home situation or how they would cope with their condition after they left the healthcare facility. …show more content…
Therefore, the lack of proper communication between the family caregivers and the healthcare providers result to frequent hospital readmissions. Lack of therapeutic communication skills among the nurses may be a contributing factor to the problem of communication. It is important to educate the patients to learn about themselves as well as what to expect after the discharge. This will help the family members to learn special skills that will enable them to take over the responsibility of continuing care. Most importantly, the patients have the right and responsibility to make decisions about their continuing care. The quality of information given by the healthcare professionals significantly influence the stress and anxiety, satisfaction with care, and concordance with treatment of the patient and the family