Handling Patient’s Complaints

There’s a universal law that says “To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” This is to say that patients and their relatives will always have something to say about the care received from nurses in a healthcare facility. This is why it is important that nurses do their jobs to the best of their ability so that they can be more confident in dealing with feedbacks from people especially if it is not favorable.

A lot of people outside the nursing profession do not realize how tough the job is already and they seem to have this perfect picture painted in their head of how a nurse should behave or carry out his or her duty such that a slight deviation from that is tantamount to the nurse being incompetent or incapable. Sometimes, complaints from patients are right and sometimes, they are simply far-fetched as a result of misconception on the part of the patient about certain measures taken by the nurse. The irony of it is that such actions might actually have been to the benefit of the patient but because he or she does not understand what is going on, such actions might be perceived as unfavorable. How then do you as a nurse deal with such negative feedback when you know you have done your job to the best of your ability? Well, the trick is this: learn from the bad ones and celebrate the good ones; very simple!

Truth is, it’s never easy to hear people say challenging things about the way you do your job on a normal day. Then for the nursing profession, it’s even harder considering the focus is on getting it right for all the patients, all of the time. Being a professional, however, means being willing and able to hear the hard detail as well as the positive detail. It means being able to take feedback, good or bad, to improve the way you and your team works. Remember that the aim of the profession is to ensure that the care being provided really does meet the needs of the patients, their families and loved ones.