Communication has obviously been a hot topic of these blogs. This past week there have been a couple of cases where my colleague and I have had to improvise a little in the ICU. I had a patient who suffered a CVA and was also Deaf and Mute due to congenital Rubella. Trying to get the patient to take some deep breaths and have a couple of coughs was a lot harder than you think! Luckily I enlisted the help of a family member and together we got the patient to do what was needed.
My colleague had a patient who was Croatian and unable to speak English. Treatment times were spent virtually playing charades in an effort to get the patient to take some deep breaths and have a cough. We joked that the patient probably had no idea what we were trying to do and probably thought the nice 'boys in blue' were clown doctors who came around a couple of times a day and did things to try and make her laugh.......interesting experiences that's for sure.
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3 comments:
hi jarrod,
so was it fun plpaying charades?
i have seen a picture book in my ward perhaps, next time to make things easier, you could look for such books to make your job slightly easier?
if not, i think playing charades and getting patients to laugh is a good technique to get them to take a deep breath!
haha...It's always a good challenge when you come across patients with a hearing deficit or language barrier.
I had a patient during my cardio placement who was almost completely deaf and was MRSA positive so we had to glove and gown up completely. Wow was that good challenge. Luckily though she was still able to read. After a week we created some pretty good hand signals to communicate with each other.
Good point Dav, on how making patients laugh is a form of taking deep breaths. Possibly a new treatment technique that needs to be further researched.
I have also had several patients with english as a second language. Like Sabrina I had to glove and gown to see him, but we had his family members write down some phrases like: 'Feeling light headed' & 'It hurts here...' This really helped as the korean sentences were written next to the english translations.
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