6 Vital Nursing Assistant Communication Skills and How to Improve Them

One of the most challenging aspects of a nursing assistant job is the high demand for communication with those around you. Whether they’re patients, doctors, or other healthcare professionals, you always need to effectively engage with people. Here are six essential nursing assistant communication skills, plus a few tips to help you improve them.

Body Language

Body language is essential to effective communication as a nursing assistant. How you stand or pose when you talk can convey messages beyond the words you’re saying. Therefore, it’s important to identify signs of off-putting body language and correct them to improve your communication skills. Try sitting in front of a mirror and look at your posture. Slouching makes you look tired or unsure of yourself, so try to straighten your back as much as possible. You want to be able to look confident and relaxed. Practice standing and sitting straight, and in no time, you’ll be doing it without even thinking. Additionally, it’s important that when you talk with someone, you maintain eye contact throughout the conversation. This shows people that you’re interested in what they’re telling you and displays confidence in yourself.

Listening

For a conversation as a nursing assistant to be truly successful, listening may be even more important than talking. Listening is how you can build trust and respect with people and develop beneficial working relationships with your coworkers and managers. When you’re visiting with patients throughout the day, it’s also important to listen to them intently because the smallest cues could be a sign of their health improving or declining. “Active listening” is when you convey your understanding by repeating key points back to the other person in a conversation. Make a habit of this in conversations with your friends and family to improve on your listening skills.

Not Interrupting Others

Your ability to listen and communicate directly influence your success in the healthcare industry. If you have a habit of interrupting people, you’ll want to work on stopping that behavior. It’s understandable to be excited and want to contribute immediate feedback to ideas, but you need to be sure that you’re not cutting off the person with whom you’re speaking. Much like active listening, you may work on resisting the temptation to interrupt people during everyday conversations with those around you.

Patience

Sometimes the conversations you have with patients or other healthcare professionals may not be the most interesting thing happening in your environment. Other times, a person might be a poor communicator and have a hard time getting a point across. Because of this, you need to exercise additional patience when talking with people at work. Give people enough time to communicate their point to you and show them that you’re interested in helping them. Granting a person your undivided attention or waiting an extra moment before responding to a person’s comments can often show that you’re truly listening.

Maintaining Positivity

While this is important for your overall quality of life, remaining positive can also benefit your nursing assistant communication skills. For example, if you’re talking with patients about possible treatment plans or potential health outcomes, staying upbeat may go a long way to make them feel better about their current situation.

Emotional Control

It’s also important to know when to scale it back and become a little more serious. When dealing with patients and other healthcare professionals, you may have a variety of conversations that elicit a wide range of emotions. Try to remember that if you get angry or upset, you should remain professional and courteous during the conversation. Be aware of how your emotions may be affecting your ability to communicate and work. Try not to let your emotions cloud your judgment.