Homework Question on Hearing-Impaired Patients
- Think about a patient you have cared for who was hearing impaired. Please write some in first person about the challenges I faced as a nurse with deaf patients.
- What special challenges did this patient face? Please use it as a patient that is deaf and the nurse communicating.
- Write patients feel marginalized by the health care profession. Ask patient for preferred mode of communication, examples lip-reading, written, Phone communication, How I as a nurse focus on the patients overall health and wellness, not just the disability. working with an interpreter
- Were those challenges different for the person’s family?
- How did that affect your nursing practice? IT took more time to care for the patient to make sure they understood. Please give examples and elaborate.
- 2 references within 5 years please
Homework Answer on Hearing-Impaired Patients
Hearing impairment has been affecting a significant population globally. Sataloff (2012) indicates that according to the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders, as at 2012, 17% of the American adults had hearing impairments. Of this population, a fraction of them are patients in hospitals and nurses have to take care of them. In this essay, I will discuss the challenges I faced as a nurse when dealing with a hearing-impaired patient.
In a health care facility, patients with hearing impairments face a wide-range of challenges (Theunissen et al., 2014). Mostly, these challenges are experienced when the patient is dealing with the nurse, doctor, and even interacting with the other patients. When dealing with the nurse, the main challenge is during communication. I had to ask my patient what his preferred mode of communication was.
He chose lip-reading. When communicating with the patient, I had to speak while looking at him directly. This was to enable him read my lips. This was not practically possible at all times. Sometimes he could not understand me when I spoke to him while facing a different direction. In other occasions, he could misread my lips since I had an accent. This made communication a big challenge. The patient had a low self-esteem (Theunissen et al., 2014).