Importance of Soft Skills for Nursing Professionals (2024)

Nursing is a demanding profession. To cater to the demands of this profession, developing hard and soft skills helps nurses to do well in their careers. The importance of soft skills for nursing professionals is immense. The nursing courses in Canada for Indian students emphasise on various clinical and behavioural skills that help nurses do well professionally.

Soft skills are a combination of personal traits, attitudes, and qualities. They must be improved through conscious effort. They are very important for surviving and becoming a leader in your profession. Nursing students must be willing to prepare comprehensively when it comes to soft skills.

Nurses have to be critically competent and they must also know how to relate to patients so that they can improve the chances of better health outcomes. Developing soft skills helps nursing professionals effectively cope with fast-paced medical settings.

What are Soft Skills?

Soft skills are traits that help professionals in all industries to work effectively. The profession of nursing in Canada requires nurses to be competent. Soft skills supplement the clinical skills and lead to improved patient care outcomes. Some of the common examples of soft skills include critical thinking, communication, leadership, professionalism, positivity, etc.

Why Is It Important That Nurses Have Soft Skills?

Healthcare goals are not accomplished successfully without good written and verbal communication. Nurses often work as a part of a team that includes other nurses, physicians, and staff members.

A multidisciplinary healthcare team may be filled with many professionals. So, nurses must not be afraid to contribute their nursing expertise to patients. Patients who feel dismissed also struggle to make sense of their diagnosis and treatment. They end up becoming confused, agitated, and unresponsive which affects their well-being.

Hence, nurses must be confident in their abilities and take the time to convey important information. This ensures that the patients understand their condition and possible interventions. For this reason, students are trained in soft skills while pursuing nursing courses in Canada.

By using soft skills, nurses can effectively communicate with others and also boost patient satisfaction. Soft skills help a nursing professional to build good relationships with patients. It helps in:

• Showcasing cultural sensitivity and open-mindedness.
• Understanding a patient’s values and preferences.
• Listening attentively.
• Making eye contact when talking to patients.
• Motivating and educating the patient about prioritizing their health and medical condition.
• Showing empathy to patients.
• Using different methods such as videos, pamphlets, conversations, and demonstrations that explain a patient’s condition, what to expect during a procedure, and how to carry out the aftercare therapy.

Different Soft Skills Needed in Nursing:

Soft skills can impact all aspects of how a patient or a family member may evaluate their healthcare encounter. They make a difference to the workplace as well. If there is any failure in communication, critical thinking or even time management, a medical unit finds it difficult to function properly and provide healthcare.

These skills can also impact outcomes and productivity while impacting the patient’s perception of their health and the healthcare setting. Different soft skills needed in nursing are mentioned below.

1. Communication: When you work as a nurse, communication will be an integral aspect of a life or death situation. The result of such a sensitive health situation depends on a nurse’s ability to communicate effectively.

Nurses must ensure that they ask questions respectfully and carefully while listening to patients’ responses for getting accurate data. This is important because healthcare staff depends on the information that nurses collect.

The nurses must also convey their treatment and recovery plans clearly. Some of the best communicators employ sincerity, kindness, and confidentiality. Nursing professionals who communicate effectively can signal empathy to patients and their families for improving care.

1. Critical Thinking: Nursing courses in Canada for Indian students teach many things to future nurses. However, putting this knowledge into a successful nursing practice comes with the ability to think critically in stressful situations.

Good critical thinking skills count as one of the most necessary characteristics of a nursing professional. After studying the best nursing programs in Canada, the willingness to apply clinical guidelines and best practices depend on the critical thinking ability of a nurse.

Nurses must learn to develop this skill because it goes far in improving the scope of healthcare delivery. Critical thinking also helps in making important decisions that can save lives. When considering nursing care, nurses approach all situations with logic, clarity, and precision.

1. Compassion: When you choose nursing courses in Canada for Indian students, an important nursing trait taught is compassion. During an unfamiliar and emotionally stressful situation, patients can become overwhelmed. They experience anxiety over a diagnosis and they get frustrated because things do not go as planned and needs aren’t met.

Hence, it is important to approach patients with compassion. Providing sympathetic care to vulnerable patients can help in making them feel safe, happy, and less stressed. The absence of compassion can also create unwanted outrage from the public, media, or many civic organizations.

Compassion in nursing starts with fundamental care and ensuring that patients are comfortable, well-fed, and escorted to the toilets. Additionally, it also means respect, empathy, and understanding of the special needs of a person. All compassionate nurses are honest and understand the patients down to their nature and problems.

1. Teamwork: Way beyond the patient interactions, nursing professionals also need to work well with others on their team. This includes doctors and other health care professionals. Good teamwork between an interdisciplinary team of healthcare professionals can affect patient outcomes and safety.

Nurses should communicate with team members, understand the workplace culture, resolve conflicts, and also accept team decisions. Some other attributes of successful team members also include honesty, discipline, humility, creativity, and curiosity.

The members of a well-functioning healthcare team also report improved job satisfaction and well-being. Nurses who contribute towards a positive team environment perform their work more efficiently while also avoiding burn out.

1. Professionalism: Regardless of whether it is taking care of patients, administering medical processes and medicines, or keeping up the patient records, it is important for nurses to be professional.

There might be times when nurses have to deal with difficult patients but it is important to not let that experience affect them. All patients must be viewed and respected with dignity.

The nursing profession is very dynamic and requires competent care and confident leadership. As nurses progress in their careers, they will find themselves representing the nursing field at every point of contact within the organization. Therefore, it is extremely crucial for nurses to practice and inculcate very high standards of professionalism.

1. Accountability: In the healthcare field, nurses must accept their responsibility and work dedicatedly towards improving themselves. This goes for nursing leaders too. While pursuing nursing courses in Canada for Indian students, students are taught accountability for this reason.

The nurses should remain accountable for their actions along with the team members too. Accountability is important for finding shortcomings and creating plans for improvements in the future. It also improves healthcare outcomes considerably.

1. Resilience: The nursing profession is directly related to the life and death consequences. Nursing professionals should develop considerable resilience so that they can deal with stressful situations effectively.

If a nurse is resilient then coping with a setback becomes easy and it becomes even simpler to deal with a challenging situation that can affect patient care. Nurses should learn to adapt to ever-changing professional environments and continually monitor their own mental state in the process.

1. Stress Management: The nursing profession might become draining very often. With a combination of working challenges, irritated patients, long hours, and conflicted colleagues, nurses can become dissatisfied and stressed. In order to avoid a situation like this, stress management must be learned for better survival in clinical settings.

Learning how to cope with stress is a solution for practitioners to manage workplace challenges. Many experts agree that with the kind of responsibility that relies on the shoulders of nurses, stress is common. However, this stress is manageable.

Nurses can take the assistance of their seniors for better self-development and an ability to deal with stressful situations. These seniors can act as a mentor and give nursing practitioners a fair chance to express various concerns. Nurses who learn how to cope with stress and stay in control of difficult situations have a much better chance of taking up leadership positions.

Developing Soft Skills for Nursing:

Nursing professionals should apply their soft skills to complement the technical aspects of the job. While treating a patient, physical health is not the only thing that matters in the equation. There are verbal and non-verbal responses that can be identified by nurses for treating physical ailments.

While nursing professionals enter the field with the required medical knowledge to offer care, developing nursing skills is a constant endeavour. Continued experience and self-reflection along with an ability to accept feedback help nurses hone these skills. Nursing professionals who combine hard and soft skills with excellent emotional and social abilities are able to offer exemplary healthcare.

Conclusion:

Nursing is a fast-paced profession that requires nurses to be flexible in coping with ever-changing situations. Soft skills help the nurses to do just that. If you adopt and practise all the essential traits that are mentioned above then they will be good to go.