Abstract

Introduction: Being the forefront of health care, nurses play a vital role in health promotion and maintenance. Apart from context specific knowledge and skills, nurses are required to have non cognitive soft skills for better health provision.

Objective: To assess the change in participants’ self-rating on communication skills scale before training and 3 months post-training follow up.

Methods: The study participants comprised of all nurses who were employed at Liaquat National Hospital (LNH). 42 Sessions were conducted for 722 nursing staff of LNH between 15^th May 2018 to 18th July 2019. This 6-hour course mainly focussed on highlighting the importance of basic concepts of effective communication related to nursing practice. Nurses were asked to fill the communication scale created by Susan Barkman and Krisanna Machtmes (Perdue University). Before the start of each workshop, participants were asked to self-rate their communication on this scale. This self-rating was again done after 3 months of training as a follow up.

Result: Nurses’ pre and post self-rating on various components of communication skills shows a statistically significant change in their responses (follow up training ratings minus before training ratings). 21 out of 23 (91%) of our items showed statistically significant change (p<0.05) in nurses’ ratings except for item numbers 3 and 23 that showed non-significant results (p>0.05).

Conclusion: Present study discussed the development and implementation of a six hour hospital wide CSTC for nurses in a tertiary care settings. Follow-up self-ratings on communication scales after three months of training showed significant improvement on various aspects of communication skills.

Keywords: Communication, Nursing, Education, Training programs, Program evaluation/ methods, Self-efficacy/ratings

Abbreviation: CSTC: Communication Skills Training Course