Therapeutic Humor in Nursing - Essay Example

"Therapeutic Humor in Nursing" is an excellent example of a paper on care.
There are four nursing concepts that should be taken into consideration by all nurses when dealing with patients to give their service a holistic approach. Fry says that these concepts aid nurses in choosing the best ways of attending to the patients in order to get the maximum output (100). The human response, environment, health, and nursing are the most important factors nurses should take into consideration when handling their patients. This paper focuses on one of the concepts and how nurses can use it to get the best out of their practice. The humor falls under the human response concept and is a very vital component of the nursing profession. A nurse needs to interact with the patients at all times and for him/her to be able to achieve this, the level of his/her friendliness should be beyond any reasonable doubt as some patients are not social (Greenberg 81). Such social barriers must always be overcome in order to get the best out of the nursing practice.  

My interest in humor developed because I wanted to be happy at what I am doing; being happy at work makes the working environment very friendly and reduces the level of stress and strain. I also realized that being humorous with the patients also helps in disease healing as through our interactions they were able to learn how to prevent diseases. Education acquired this way goes a very long way in saving lives as the patients open up freely to express their feelings hence making it easier to attend to them. I also realized that as an individual, laughter, and humor are very vital when it to comes to maintaining good health since I need to be in good shape to be able to discharge my duties as a nurse.

During my interaction with Adams- one of my patients, I noticed that he slept well when he had a good day filled with laughter and capitalized on that. Having been diagnosed with the HIV Virus he had so much stress as he was facing rejection from his peers and consistent criticism from his own family. He, therefore, started spending most of his time on his own reading novels, watching movies, swimming, or driving alone. This is what he told me during our first encounter as I was very interested in knowing his condition and how he was faring on. During our discussions, we touched on different aspects of life ranging from family, leisure, dating, and profession to traveling around the world. At this point, it is very important to point out that Adams wasn’t a friendly fellow but I managed to get this information from him because of how friendly I was and how I could make him laugh even though he had been through so much suffering. During our successive meetings, he could come with different stories telling how he spent his nights and how he is making new friends.

Our interactions and sessions together not only helped shape his social life but also his health as well; the levels of stress started going down especially when he learned that he was still valuable to society and could still lead a normal life. This positively contributed to his output at work as he was now able to put in more hours at work as opposed to what he was doing before because of hopelessness. I remember at one time during our initial sessions, he told me that he was on the brink of losing his job because his boss was losing patience with him due to his negative attitude at everything he did. This was slowly getting into the other members of staff which prompted the manager to summon him to change his attitude or face the sack. Humor is therefore very important to us as nurses as it helps us give the best to our patients. The case of Adams is a clear indication that being hostile to the patients can only lead to frustration as the patients may have no one to turn to especially when they are not getting enough support from the families.