Nurse and Author Beth Boynton Releases a New Book
The first edition of Successful Nurse Communication: Safe Care, Healthy Workplaces, & Rewarding Careers has been released by F.A. Davis Publishing Co.
As you know, many persistent problems with communication in healthcare are associated with medical errors, toxic cultures, horizontal and vertical violence, stress and burnout. Together they are a call to action for a fresh approach to teaching and learning these critical skills.
Wouldn’t you be excited about an engaging and compelling book that emphasizes respectful assertiveness and listening skills along with the underlying behaviors that inform our professional and therapeutic relationships as well as the teams, cultures, and systems nurses work in?
Successful Nurse Communication (SNC) is different from other text books being used in today’s Schools of Nursing Curricula and other educational programming! Here’s why:
- SNC emphasizes positive human behaviors and the development of emotional intelligence which are critical and often overlooked.From the introduction: Effective communication skills, from an intellectual perspective are fairly simple and straightforward. However, from the perspective of human behavior they are vastly more complicated. To learn to communicate effectively, professional growth must interface with personal growth in core areas of emotional intelligence, such as awareness of self and others, motivation, and self-esteem that inform assertiveness and respectful listening, which in turn contribute to team development and healthy workplace cultures.
- SNC is dedicated to Gabriel Summerhill, a little boy who at 20 months of age died because of medical errors. If you watch his mother, Leilani Schweitzer’s TED Talk consider how many communication issues directly or indirectly played a role in his death and the aftermath. This is a compelling message for nurses and students to take communication as seriously as pharmacology, anatomy and physiology, and any studies of disease and treatment. The text has chapters on patient safety, respectful workplaces, patient experience, and stress and self-care all of which inspire and instill a commitment to effective and respectful communication.
- One of the “special features” of SNC is called Confident Voices and each chapter has one or two short essays from experts who share their perspectives on the importance of communication. There are 27 contributors and include nationally recognized leaders, unknown direct care clinicians, a wide variety of disciplines and specialties. It is tempting to list them all with their intriguing essay titles, but I’ll save that for a separate blogpost. For now, just consider how exciting it is to have nurses, doctors, social workers, patient advocates and other clinicians share an inspiring experience or anecdotal story that highlights the vital skills in the real worlds of practice. Not only that, but think how this interdisciplinary input can influence collaborative work!
- Each of the 15 chapters was reviewed by 2 or 3 nurse instructors all over the USA and in Canada. Their feedback was extremely helpful in balancing high academic standards with an engaging tone. The book is filled with up-to-date research,evidence-based practices, and numerous examples of day-to-day application of the skills in developing healthy professional and therapeutic relationships that students at any level will relate to. Another special feature is called the Consultant Commentary where I could share my experiences in direct care and teaching more informally.
- The book includes chapters on team development, organizational culture, complex systems, learning organizations, leadership, and electronic communication and challenges students to integrate the basics of assertiveness, listening, and emotional intelligence into all of these areas. It is these basics that are at the root of many troubles we face and must be at the root of the solutions. Just imagine nurses entering the field prepared to be positive change agents! Empowered and respectful of self and others!
- There are many online features too outlined here and for professors/schools of nursing who adopt the book will have access to a comprehensive chapter by chapter Instructors Guide that includes: chapters at-a-glance, exercises for experiential learning, answer key for case study questions, commentary for reviewing reflection questions, and power point presentations that help summarize major points. In addition I have outlined 4 of my most popular interactive workshops that I’ve been teaching over the last decade!
As human beings we will never be perfect, but as nurses we must be committed to providing the safest and most compassionate care possible. While doing so we deserve to practice in workplaces that understand, respect, and support the complexity of our work. Effective and respectful communication is essential to these ideals and this is what has motivated me to write “Successful Nurse Communication”
Check out the Table of Contents!