How to improve the Caregiver-Patient Relationship?

7 Ways to Improve Caregiver-Patient Relationship

The caregiver/patient relationship can often be tenuous and difficult. Home care is a stressful setting that typically involves great sickness or disability for tempers to flare and patience to run thin. The caregiver/patient relationship is also an immensely important one.

For quality care and healing to take place, the caregiver and the patient must foster a good relationship, no matter how difficult that may be at times. Here are seven steps caregivers and patients can take to improve their relationship and form a genuine bond:

1) Learn to Ask for Help

The caregiver/patient relationship is very intimate, and it often involves difficult, confusing, or emotionally challenging scenarios. Transparency and the ability to ask for help are needed to achieve a healing relationship. To build trust, the patient and caregiver need to help each other to understand new things and clarify preferences.

2) Exercise Compassion

Frustration leads to a strained and fractured relationship, which is not appropriate for the home care setting. Instead of allowing frustration to take hold, caregivers and patients should seek to exercise compassion. Compassion for self and others allows people to soften their hearts toward another person and get to a place of honest communication.

3) Be Patient

Patience is the most important virtue a caregiver can have in every situation. It is important for a caregiver to understand that people are not always in complete control of their actions, and to give the person extra time to calm down and make different decisions. This often requires reasoning, positivity, and empathy.

4) Use Encouragement

Encouragement is an underrated soft skill. Aside from motivating patients to behave differently when needed, encouragement also goes a long way toward boosting a patient’s self-esteem. Encouragement can rapidly increase the fullness of the relationship.

5) Be an Active Listener

Each client has a story to tell and learning to truly listen to that story will quickly foster a bond and understanding. Active listening with clients encourages increased rapport and allows the caregiver to better pick up on potential warning signs. By active listening, the client can feel heard and respected.

6) Do What the Patient Loves

Helping a client feel more involved, whole, and capable, in activities he loves and misses to do can go a long way toward decreasing feelings of distress in a patient and encouraging positive changes in behavior.

7) Practice Respect

Caregivers must have a deep respect for the patient and his or her family. The patient’s home is a workplace and must be treated like one. When a caregiver is respectful of a patient’s home, belongings and preferences, the patient feels respected in turn, which leads to less distress and an increased feeling of relaxation and comfort.

When practices like empathy, active listening, respect, transparency and patience are exercised, both a patient and a client can find themselves in a deep, caring and safe relationship. These are integral in creating healing and comfort. Although home care relationships can be challenging, at times, both patient and caregiver can take a variety of simple steps toward improving the relationship and creating a lasting bond.

When Is It Time to Hire a Home Care Company?

If you want a loved one to have a good caregiver-patient working relationship and think they need daily supportive care. For many families hiring help at home allows an elderly parent to stay in the comfort of their home as long as safely possible

*Article from commhealthcare.com