Employability Skills - Essay Example

?Order 542433 Bernhard Bierlich, Ph.D. 06.02.11 Completed: 23:55 Employability Skills: Communication, critical thinking and teamwork CONTENTS Introduction Communication Critical thinking Teamwork Conclusion References Word count: 2,057 (pp. 2-9) Introduction High communicative skills, critical thinking and being an excellent team player are all highly desired characteristics employers are looking for in candidates for a nursing position. These are, as one realizes, however interlinked or interconnected and together they produce a persuasive result. None of these characteristics can convince, or “sell themselves”, when they stand alone. When singling out any one of the three attributes, the argument is therefore, one must always stress this linkage. The feature of teamwork is a fine example to focus on in that the two afore-mentioned characteristics (communication and critical thinking) come in to play in terms of what any a position demands with regard to a clear understanding of overall goals and the expected role to be performed. An understanding and ability to perform well in a team is critical. The following essay focuses on these three elements of communication, critical thinking and the value of team work/being “a team player”, a person who is comfortable working in a team. The latter characteristic, team work, expresses what it takes to achieve employment. While the former two are indispensable, it demands the ability to work in a team to bring out one’s skills of communication and critical thinking. Communication Being a “good” communicator is essential. Within health care, it can take several different forms, it can be paternalistic or empathic and caring and involve the patient in decisions regarding his/her care (Brotherton et al., 2006). A nurse’s communicative skills reflect the major goal of nursing, namely being person-oriented and humanistic in one’s practices and patient care. This humanistic approach is very much at the core of the humanistic mission of nursing practice and operative care. The hypotheses regarding the patient-person deriving form this approach are centrally important to stress as one’s core communicative skill. This is to remind us that sick people are purposeful agents, strategists, and meaning makers. Communication must be person centered. This allows us to look at ill-health as linked to human beings and embedded in the life course of individuals, a life course that is specific and continually changes, develops and is highly complex. Communication must, thus, rest on an understanding that sickness and related impairments have various social and psychological dimensions. In one’s communication and care for the patient one must realize that there are two sides to sickness, “disease” (biological malfunctions recorded as particular disease categories, e.g., cancer, neurological disorders, cardiac diseases, palsy) and the response to these by patients and their carers (family), the “illness experience”. The diagnosis of disease is based on external medical criteria. “Illness”, on the other hand, is defined as the personal reaction to “perceived disease”. Illness is, by this definition, a personal construction and refers to the world of the patient, his/her coping with illness. The distinction between “disease” and “illness” provides a view of the social and psychological complexities involved, and is fundamental to a comprehension of the patient (Good 1994). Critical Thinking On the top of a potential employer’s list is often a candidate’s problem-solving skills, i.e. a person’s ability to successfully to complete a task and/or solve a problem, which may involve a great deal of creativity and/or pooling of his/her team’s resources (see on “teamwork” below).. The next characteristic to be stressed therefore, the faculty of critical thinking, shapes and is shaped by the previously-discussed fundamental communicative approach to the patient as a human being. These two attributes are clearly interlinked. It is therefore difficult to determine which characteristic comes first, “communication” or “critical thinking”. The argument is that only analytically can the two features be distinguished. In practice they are interconnected. The final, and vital, element needed to make an employable nurse, “teamwork”, will be discussed in the final section. As said, there are two sides, to sickness: “disease” and “illness”. To begin with, the nurse has to show her/himself as being competent in and knowledgeable about evidence-based and statistical findings and background information about the respective disease being treated. Medical knowledge relies on biological assumptions about the body as an undeniable, natural reality – assumptions that are seen as irrefutable and the ultimate benchmark against which to measure treatment, intervention and care (Good 1994). Not the patient as a human being and person but rather his/her body, is the object of attention. Being competent with regard to his/her knowledge and understanding of disease and its demands on the sick, s/he has, in a parallel movement so to speak, also to be able to consider the humanistic demands of her profession and thus critically evaluate the “disease” perspective which is often detached from the person and his/her functioning as a human being. The illness dimension of sickness or the personal aspects of the encounter with disease expresses itself in narratives of the sick centring on coping and living with disease and related limitations. The sick is seen by the medical profession as unscientific or irrational in his/her thoughts. The patient, unlike the profession medicine, thinks in terms of feelings, notions, culturally patterned norms and “irrational” beliefs about the body and its functioning rather than presumably certain, scientific “medical knowledge” (Good 1994). Because of its “ideological hegemony” biomedicine often fails to realize the “patient’s point of view” that is structured by a rich reality and various action contexts full of many different meanings. Knowing about the world of the patient introduces the health care practitioner to the experience of illness which the medical practitioner often knows little about. His/her education has driven him/her away from that vital aspect of illness and forced him/her to adopt a detached medical gaze (Good 1994). Illness has meaning and is often organized in networks of meaning that structure the experience in terms of interconnected somatic, social and psychological responses and coping mechanisms. The nursing profession has to compete with an emphasis on “disease” and at the same time strive to work within a framework that grasps the social and psychological implications of disease for the patient, the patients as a person with individual desires and hopes for the future. Such a framework is available to nursing via number of qualitative studies (e.g., Bolderton et al. 2006, 2007; Bolderton and Abbott 2009) and a “narrative understanding of the illness experience”. Illness narratives are marked by variations and developments over the course of life of a patient-person (a longitudinal, dynamic view of illness is always at the base of illness narratives) (Mattingly and Garro 2000). Referring to the diversity of responses when asked about PEG feeding, tube feeding via percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy, and its impact upon daily life in adults (Brotherton et al., 2006, p. 365), it is therefore a characteristic of the person-oriented approach to realize that illness is also a personal definition (each person is a unique human being). It may be light or severe by objective standards, but while some people feel that the illness forces them to rest or to stay at home, become moody or depressed, others suppress these feelings and attempt to break out of their “isolation” and socialize (examples of responses to PEG tube feeding). Physical functions/ malfunctions point thus to the person’s body, as well as to social and psychological fields. Health and sickness become a question of the person’s relationships with the world. His relationships are also the sources of his identity. The person-centred, humanistic mode, engages with a problem that medical science is aware of but attempts to diminish, its uncertainty as to the effect of a treatment or its prognosis. Brotherton and Abbott note “the medical complexities of the patients and the uncertainties that can exist around perceived benefits and risks of feeding, especially in cases where the prognosis is difficult to determine” (Brotherton and Abbott 2009, p. 308). Studying biomedicine and, e.g., involvement in decision making regarding treatment and PEG tube placement implies also studying biomedicine as a system and in terms of the “distance” it creates between itself and the “other”, in this case patients and their carers. As Brotherton and Abbott (2009) also point out many patients consider their involvement in decision making lacking or inadequate and so is the information given, and the communication with health care professionals is also perceived as poor and their attitudes to patients is often seen as condescending and paternalistic (ibid: 307). Teamwork There are several characteristics to well-functioning teamwork: the team has to have clear goals, members have to occupy defined roles. Communication within the team has also to be smooth. This is achieved by involving all the team players in the decision-making process, acknowledging and valuing the diversity of the group members, cooperating by pooling various skills and expertise, managing conflict well and stressing the relaxed, informal interaction within the group. A successful team consists of members who all aim in the same direction and have a common objective. In comes again the value of communication. This time, what is demanded, however, is open and clear communication within the group (http://www.teambuilding-solutions.com/advantages-of-teamwork/characteristics-of-teamwork). Making oneself attractive to a potential employer, one has to stress that one is a true team player with reference to all of the above and that one has the communicative skills and the competence (critical thinking) that lets one occupy a ( clearly defined) role that calls for one’ skills and competence. In other words, teamwork is essential in terms of one’s employability. The other two ingredients are similarly vital in terms of being able to play a valued role in the group but clearly cannot stand alone. A group or team that performs well and smoothly enjoys one another’s company is a prime value. Employers want a candidate to fit into such a group, to contribute to its effectiveness. Successful functioning will be based on full transparency, respect, esteem and trust in the various competences and communicative skills of the team members. Studies have also shown that high performance in teamwork is associated with increased patient satisfaction with care, patient safety, a reduction in patient fall rates, clinical error reduction, improved end of life care, and better patient outcomes in general (Kalisch and Lee 2010). Conclusion The analysis of employability skills (the value of communication, critical thinking, teamwork) leads to a conclusion about the connection of a nurse’s mode of communication and his/her critical thinking about care. The “final test” for a nurse’s employability is how well s/he functions vis-a-vis the goals to be achieved and the roles s/he has to perform as a team player. In her/his performance s/he must apply her/his communicative insights and critical thinking about the two positions of sickness, “disease” and “illness” that imply a “dual emphasis” for the caring professions on both “competence” (evidence-based, biomedical understandings and insights) and “caring” (for the patient who is not merely an object, a sick body, but a real human being). The conclusion stresses therefore a humanistic approach to care a concept that emphasizes the quality of the encounter between health care professionals and patients as a key determinant of successful health care. A psychological and social understanding of the sick as a human being refines the framework used by medicine that views the sick person as a machine that needs to be fixed. The patient as a human being becomes an object of treatment only, with a detached focus on disease categories (Cassell 1976) A humanistic approach insists on seeing “the person in the round”, as having a mind and a body (these are inter-connected) and the patient is a person and human being involved in numerous social relations and experiencing various emotional states of anxiety and fear that need to be cared for as well. Teamwork realizes and optimizes the communicative skills and the critical thinking regarding “disease”-”illness” and patient care. Teamwork refines or advances the two other elements and is ultimately the glue that connects the other parts and imbues them with meaning by stressing clear goals and roles that have to be performed. Teamwork is situated within a dynamic and person-oriented context where “patterns of living” emerge as vital factors in therapeutic success. The psychiatrist Harry Sullivan sees therapy as a person-centred, phenomenological and interpersonal exchange where the expert meets with the client “for the purpose of elucidating characteristic patterns of living [of the person or client]” … “which patterns he experiences as particularly troublesome or especially valuable…”(Sullivan 1970:4). Sullivan’s insights coincide with this exploration of communicative skills, critical thinking and teamwork. References Brotherton, A, Abbott, J and Aggett, P 2006 ‘The impact of percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy feeding upon daily life in adults’. Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics, vol. 19, pp. 356-67. Brotherton, A, Abbott, J and Aggett, P 2007 ‘The impact of percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy feeding in children; the parental perspective’. Child: care, health and development, vol. 33, no. 5, pp. 539–546. Brotherton, A and Abbott, J 2009 ‘Clinical decision making and the provision of information in PEG feeding: an exploration of patients and their carers’ perceptions’. Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics, vol. 22, pp. 302–309. Cassell, E 1976 ‘Disease as an “it”: Concepts of disease revealed by patient’s presentation of symptoms’. Social Science and Medicine, vol. 20, pp. 29-37. Good, B1994 Medicine, Rationality and Experience. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Mattingly, C and Garro, L Editors 2000 Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing. Berkeley, University of California Press. Kalisch, B and Lee, K 2010 ‘The impact of teamwork on missed nursing care’. Nursing Outlook, vol. 58, no. 5, pp. 233-41. Sullivan, H 1970[1944, 1945] The Psychiatric Interview. New York and London, W.W. Norton & Company. http://www.teambuilding-solutions.com/advantages-of-teamwork/characteristics-of-teamwork. Read More