COMMUNICATION SKILLS AND PERSONALITY TRAITS AS DETERMINANTS OF NURSES’ INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH PATIENTS IN PUBLIC HOSPITALS IN BAUCHI STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

There has been myriad of complaints about the poor attitude, interpersonal and unethical behaviour of health care providers, particularly nurses towards patients in public hospitals in Nigeria. This has been attributed among others to their personality traits and poor communication skills. Previous studies have focused largely on provision of infrastructure, funding, work overload, training and quality of nursing care with little emphasis on nurses’ communication skills and personality traits. This study was designed, therefore, to examine the extent to which communication skills and personality trait variables influence Nurses’ Interpersonal Relationship with Patients (NIRwP) in public hospitals in Bauchi State, Nigeria.

The Big Five-factor Model of Personality, Peplau’s Interpersonal Relation and Scudder’s Communication theories anchored the study, while the descriptive survey design was employed. Bauchi State was randomly selected from the North East zone, while three tertiary hospitals were enumerated; and six general (secondary) hospitals with the highest number of nurses/midwives and patients were purposively selected. The stratified and proportional sampling techniques were used to select 600 nurses/midwives and 300 patients across the selected nine public hospitals. Communication Skills (r=.0.91), Personality Traits (r=0.79) and Nurse-Patient Interpersonal Relationship (r=0.85) questionnaires were used for data collection. These were complemented with in-depth interview sessions with nurses/mid-wives, and 10 and six sessions of key informant interviews with patients and medical doctors (involved in administration), respectively. Quantitative data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Pearson product moment correlation and Multiple Regression at 0.05 level of significance, while qualitative data were content analysed.

Patients assessed nurses’ dominant features as listening (89.0%), verbal (85.7%) and non-verbal (45.2%) communication skills as well as the openness to experience (87.0%), conscientiousness (47.3%) and extraversion (48.1%) traits. Nurses’ attitude were affected by work environment (86.0%) and loads (85.8%), followed by mood (46.0%), condition of service (45.5%) and patients’ attitude and behaviour (45.0%) were presumptions of nurses’ interpersonal relationships. Listening (r=0.50), verbal (r=0.43) and non-verbal (r=0.17) skills had significant relationships with NIRwP. Openness to experience (r=0.35), conscientiousness (r=0.17) and agreeableness (r=-0.11) traits had significant relationships with NIRwP, while neuroticism and extraversion had none. Communication skills and personality traits had a significant joint prediction on NIRwP (F(8; 365)=28.61, Adj.R2=0.37); accounting for 37.2% of its variance. Communication skills (F(8; 365)=58.08, Adj. R2=0.29) and personality traits (F(8; 365)=20.34, Adj. R2=0.19) had relative predictions onNIRwP. Listening skills (β=0.30), openness to experience (β=0.26), verbal skills (β=0.24), conscientiousness (β=0.10), extraversion (β=0.08) and agreeableness (β=0.06) contributed to NIRwP, while non-verbal skills and neuroticism did not. Nurses were initially looked upon with negative perception, which changed with constant contact. Due to myriad of complaints from the patients, managements have taken steps to provide training and mentorship programmes for the nurses.

Listening skills, openness to experience, verbal skills, conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness personality traits influenced nurses’ interpersonal relationship with patients in public hospitals in Bauchi State. There is the need to re-orientate the nurses on matters of interpersonal relationship with patients.