For most of us, nurses are the first and last people we meet in our lives. This year, we take the time to recognize our outstanding care team during National Nurses Month. The theme this year is Nurses Make the Difference, and in today’s healthcare climate, that sentiment resonates closer to our hearts than ever before.

Providing patients with a positive experience consistently, contributes to forming a connection between hospital and patient, allowing patients to trust and rely on the care they are receiving. Nurses directly impact the patient experience. How to care for patients can be taught but each nurse brings a unique heart that opens to those they’re caring for. This connection allows providers to step beyond care and build trust with their patients. Through care coordination, plan communication, and emotional support, these heroes help hospitals achieve positive patient loyalty and outcomes. Improved patient outcomes have been associated with higher profitability for hospitals, so let’s discuss nurses' impact. 

Care Coordination

Nurses are touch points between patients, treatment, and medical teams giving them a special insight into each patient’s experience. This perspective allows them to see opportunities in care delivery and coordination. With the modernization of healthcare delivery, integrated care is key. Employing a micro and macro level look at patient care, nurses and healthcare systems are equipped to address the complex needs of patients. Their expertise improves the safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of care. Donating their insights, nurses help craft the right care path for patients encompassing their needs while respecting their preferences. Through this, nurses contribute to building trust between hospitals and patients, leading to continuously better care. 

Care Plan Communication

Nurses are outstanding in practicing patient empathy. They are experts in creating a special bond with patients through daily care and open communication. Communication is a pillar of delivering care for nurses. Fostering an open dialogue improves care planning and allows for patients and their families to thoroughly understand their health moving forward. Shaping the healthcare experience of the patient and their loved ones. 

Ensuring patients have a space to vocalize their symptoms, accurate effective evaluations of patient condition can be made. Nurses can improve communication with patients through giving patients the space to speak without making them feel rushed or ignored, expressing compassion through verbal and non-verbal cues, and asking open-ended questions. The better the communication, the better nurses are able to develop care plans and discuss these plans with patients and their families.

Emotional Support

Caring for patients in their most vulnerable time is what nurses do. They provide physical care and emotional support that leads patients down the path of healing. Emotional support is part of delivering patient centered care and has a major impact on patient outcomes. It builds trust with patients for them to be able to transparently discuss their condition in a way that makes them feel heard and honored in their experience. There are three major components in providing emotional support to patients: a cognitive understanding of patient needs, an affective imagination of what the patient values, and an altruistic action to alleviate the patient’s pain. Focusing on these areas, nurses can create and execute a patient focused treatment plan.

A hospital's walls are empty without the life nurses bring to their environment. Curating a patient-centered environment begins with honoring the touch-point between areas of care: Our Nurses. Nurses shape the patient experience through care coordination, care plan communication, and emotional support. Without them, the trust between hospital and patient is lost. Positive patient outcomes result in patient trust and loyalty. Forging a bond with patients propels hospitals to stay engaged with their patient base while fostering positive emotions between the two.