Kate was a 33 year old single mother who had been admitted from the Emergency department with severe abdominal pain and nausea. According to staff, she was demanding (pressing the patient buzzer regularly), shouting, and crying during the shift. She verbally abused two staff members and threatened to walk out unless she received stronger pain relief and use of the telephone and a TV.
Nurses encounter patients like Kate each day in any large metropolitan hospital. Kate was not deliberately intending to create stress or more work in the nurses’ day. Yet a difficult nurse-patient relationship began to develop and consume more nurses’ time than the patient’s condition would originally have suggested. Nurse Unit Managers are well aware that managing difficult behaviours from patients is a common problem experienced by general nurses (Stein-Parbury, 2009). These difficult behaviours limit the nurse’s ability to carry out their normal nursing care, as more time is spent in dealing with patients’ demands and complaints.
As a result of an increased likelihood of confronting difficult behaviours, nurses need to have the self-confidence to be able to call upon appropriate strategies to pre-empt, de-escalate, and manage these behaviours in a way that ensures the safety of staff, patients, and visitors. Fortunately, managing difficult nurse-patient relationships is a skill that can be learnt and improved with practice. Aggression, complaints, or negativity from patients require nurses to be able to understand how they respond to these behaviours. The nurse needs the ability to evaluate each incident using empathetic questioning so that she can identify the best plan of nursing care to manage these difficult behaviours (Smith & Brunero, 2007).