Maintaining a Calm, Clean, and Quiet Nursing Safe Environment (Research Paper Sample)

Maintaining a Calm, Clean, and Quiet Nursing Safe Environment
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DECLARATION
The relation between human beings and their environment, including the way the environment influences healthcare delivery to patients, has continued to receive attention from many scholars. Specifically, the environment in this case includes the physical, as well as psychological factors, which affect or influence a patient’s survival and life (Meade et al. 2011). The definition thus crosses the care continuum for the settings where the patient and the nurse interact, like in a hospital, clinic, school, community center, home and long-term care center.
Essentially, international best practice informs nurses on the importance of sustaining calm, clean, as well as quiet nursing environment, which promotes safety for the patient and the members of the multidisciplinary team. It is thus difficult to underestimate the significance of any standards thus promote the sustenance of the calm, clean, as well as quiet nursing environment. Notably, over the past 2000 years, Galen (an ancient Roman doctor) recognized the imperative healing aspect, which the environment can offer (Rubert, Long & Hutchinson, 2007). As he treated his patients, Galen observed cleanliness due to his philosophy on the negative consequences that unclean conditions could have on patients.
Accordingly, Florence Nightingale emphasized on the influence of environment on healing in 1970 as she nursed wounded Crimean War soldiers (Rubert, Long & Hutchinson, 2007). Specifically, Nightingale paid attention to sanitation, among other environmental aspects promoting healing of a patient’s mind and body. Today, nurses have utilized the environmental concept in designing hospital units that can promote healing.
Undeniably, through the scrupulous training, many nurses now understand that a proper environment normally protects the patients and allows health professionals to operate optimally (Meade et al. 2011). Moreover, safe environments ameliorate patients’ satisfaction with health care, hence making them cooperative with the health professionals. In turn, when the patient and the health professional have a good relationship, healthcare delivery becomes very easy.
INTRODUCTION
Significantly, research already indicates that the concept of calm clean, as well as quiet nursing environment, has an influence on nursing care in different ways. For instance, the proper environment promotes healing hence encouraging the nurses to continue administering their nursing care effectively. Specifically, healing is different from curing, which entails fixing problems, decreasing symptoms and disease eradication (Zborowsky & Kreitzer, 2008). A patient can achieve healing even when the disease has no cure. For instance, the chronically ill may learn being at peace in spite of their disease.
Conversely, a person may fail to achieve healing, but get cure. For instance, a breast cancer remission may make a person grieve about the inability to function and other losses (Zborowsky & Kreitzer, 2008). Therefore, healing environments work to promote the harmony of body, mind and spirit. Indeed, proper environments reduce anxiety and stress, hence improving a patient’s health. On the contrary, dirty, hostile, dirty, noisy and confusing rooms in the hospital leave patients feeling worried, helpless and sad, hence increasing their risk of developing hypertension, muscle tension and increased heart rate.
More often than not, nurses are motivated to work harder on a patient if the patient’s outcomes are improving as they receive the prescribed nursing interventions. In a situation where the hospital is able to create a calm, clean, as well as quiet healing environment, patients’ outcomes are bound to improve and so is the nursing care (Zborowsky & Kreitzer, 2008). However, with inappropriate environments, the patients will mostly have poor outcomes, which may in turn demoralize nurses and hence potentially lower the quality of nursing care provided. It is in this respect that it becomes extremely important to examine the literature published about nursing environments as highlighted below.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Calm Environment
As nurses go on with their daily work, they should envisage maintaining calm in their working environment for the benefit of their patients and themselves (Brown, 2006). Specifically, a calm nursing environment is full of peace, has no conflict, and soothes the patient in order to promote recovery and healing. More often than not, the calm environment promotes caring and compassion for the nurse, the patient and the other staffs.
Nevertheless, if the environment seemingly falls short of calming, the nurse’s calm presence and attention may make it healing. Brown indicates that one of the way of ensuring that the nursing environment is serene is to use the problem solving ‘‘look, think, as well as act’’ model in evaluating the specific environment before devising strategies of promoting calmness (2006).
In looking, the nurse observes her surroundings in order to confirm if it is calm, tolerable and conflict free. By contrast, thinking helps the nurse to reflect on whatever makes her environment calm and healing. S/he should for instance meditate on whether her presence adds healing and calmness in her environment (Brown, 2006). The thinking should also help the nurse in contemplating on how the patients served perceive their environment.
Finally yet importantly, the act component of the model allows the nurse to make the environment more peaceful, calm and comfortable. For instance, the nurse may decide to add some soothing items in the environment, including some pleasant-smelling spray, flowers, aromatherapy oils, plants or even some soothing music (Brown, 2006). With the right settings, the nurse is able to douse flames of anger, negative experiences, resentment and fear.
Importantly, a calm nursing environment should be conflict-free and should not have agitated and aggressive patients and staff. Normally, nursing care involves collaborative interactions and relationships with colleagues and clients. Nevertheless, whenever two people look at situations or an issue from varied perspectives, conflict is likely to ensue, hence compromising the relationships (CNO, 2009). During conflict, everybody struggles to express power as a way of harassing, injuring, eliminating or neutralizing a rival. If left unresolved, conflict can have many far-reaching effects, which ultimately affect all aspects of patient care.
Therefore, for the sake of provision of quality care and maintenance of calmness, the nurse must try to avoid conflict development, and resolve it before it escalates into assault or abuse. Therefore, conflict management is significant in promoting calmness in the nursing environment (CNO, 2009). The nurse should thus be able to handle difficult individuals and the tense contexts with tact and diplomacy Moreover, it is important to spot possible conflict, help in deescalating conflict and encourage open discussion and debate. Furthermore, restoring calmness in conflict-full environment requires the nurse to orchestrate some win-win solutions to the conflict.
Without calm in the nursing environment, nurses should forget about quality nursing care. It is thus recommendable for all nurses to be conversant with different ways of maintaining the environment as calm as possible (Johnson, 2014). However, it is worrying that this area of calm nursing environments has not received enough attention from the scholars. Perhaps, it is a good time that many nursing scholars started delving deeper into the topic in order to help in the improvement of nursing care and consequently improvement of patient outcomes. Essentially, any study that examines the strategies of ensuring calm in nursing environments will go a long way in helping to achieve calm at work.
Clean Environment
Nurses have a duty to maintain clean environments in their workplaces due to the effect the clean environment has on patient outcomes (OAHPP, 2012). In the contemporary healthcare settings, environmental cleaning remains an imperative aspect because it helps in reducing the amount and number of the infectious agents present in the hospital units. The cleanliness may equally eliminate certain transfer routes for microorganisms from a patient to another, hence reducing the infection risks. Healthcare settings represent complex environments, which contain different microbial flora that may pose risks to patients, visitors and staffs.
One of today’s concerns linked with the healing patient environment in the hospital is its possible role in transmitting infections. The link between the contaminated equipment in the hospital and the spread of microorganisms has received attention from different scholars, with several of them concentrating on the transfer of Norovirus, Clostridium difficile, and the multi-resistant organisms (Gauci et al. 2013).
Noteworthy, decontamination of the nursing environment is imperative in the provision of quality care because of the contact that the vulnerable patients have with the contaminated equipments (Gauci et al. 2013). Actually, research indicates that the relationship between nurses and the cleaning staff is crucial because both work in very close association and interaction with the patient environments.
However, despite the current association of environmental contamination with etiology of hospital-acquired infections, the evidence keeps changing (OAHPP, 2012). Even though many studies provide compelling evidence linking clean nursing environments with fewer hospital-acquired infections and diseases, the lack of well-designed research studies on this topic makes it very diffi...