PENGALAMAN DAN MAKNA PERAWAT TERSENYUM KEPADA PASIEN DI RUANG GAWAT DARURAT

Abstract

The management of patients with a variety of emergency classifications in the emergency room requires immediate, fast, and accurate actions. Such conditions may increase stressors and emotions for medical staff, as well as panic and anxiety for patients and families. Psycho-emotional aspects play an important role in both medical services and health workers in the emergency unit. Smiles are a form of interaction between nurses and patients that should be given in providing health services to patients as non-verbal communication. However, the high workload in the emergency unit may hinder nurses from smiling to patients. This study aimed to determine the experiences and meanings of nurses’ smiles to patients in the emergency unit. This study used a qualitative design with a descriptive phenomenological approach. The participants were purposively recruited, consisting of 13 emergency nurses, and two head nurses and two patients as triangulation subjects. Data were collected using in-depth interviews with semistructured interviews and analyzed using the Colaizzi method. The results showed six themes developed based on the objective of the study, including (1) the importance of smiling in emergency services, (2) smiling was a part of communication that encouraged happiness, (3) the impacts of smiling for patients, (4) some reasons that hindered nurses to smile in emergency services, (5) the need for motivation to give smiles as it was not easy to smile in emergency triage, and 6) the use of humor and education was considered important for emergency cases of children. This study concluded that smiles are very important for services in the emergency unit as a form of intrapersonal interaction between nurses and patients, and smiles provide comfort to patients and families.