Effective Strategies for Collaborating with Patients and their Families to Achieve Desired Health Outcomes

Several strategies can be used to enhance the effectiveness of caregivers’ engagements with their patients and patients’ families. Effective strategies for collaborating with patients and their families include patient education, self-management support, and shared decision-making (Menear et al., 2020). Shared decision-making implores caregivers to involve their patients in essential decision-making processes on healthcare interventions targeted to them. It forms the groundwork for future engagements by ensuring healthier therapeutic relationships between the patients/families and their caregivers and enables them to be on board with the therapeutic plan designed for them.

Patient education is another effective strategy for engaging patients and their families. The management of hypertension and other chronic disorders requiring long-term therapeutic plans benefits considerably from these strategies. Educative approaches enable caregivers to enhance their patient’s capacity to maintain accountability over their disease process. Through these processes, caregivers can educate their patients on the significance of medication compliance, anticipated side effects of the medication they are taking, how to address them, and when to seek medical help. Grau Canét-Wittkampf et al. (2020) report that educative approaches in chronic care set the management trajectory toward optimizing clinical outcomes by ensuring closer engagements between patients and their caregivers. It is thus important that nurses be conversant with this collaborative strategy