Attentive Listening and Confirmation Key Aspects in Health Promotion Encounters With Patients in Telephone Counselling

TL;DR

This study explores how nurses create meaningful health-promoting interactions with patients over the phone, emphasizing attentive listening and mutual understanding.

Contribution

The study provides new insights into the lived experiences of telenurses in health-promoting telephone counselling, highlighting key aspects for meaningful patient encounters.

Findings

The essence of health-promoting encounters involves a moment of confirmation and creating a sense of security for patients.

Telenurses focus on mutual understanding and attentiveness to patients in their context.

Calm, stress-free conversations help achieve a holistic, person-centred approach.

Abstract

Health‐promoting telephone counselling is a growing but underexplored area of nursing, where district nurses (telenurses) play a key role in supporting patients' health and autonomy without physical presence. While this form of care is widespread, time constraints, emotional strain, and system limitations may challenge telenurses' ability to create meaningful, person‐centred encounters. Gaining insight into how telenurses experience health‐promoting interactions is essential for improving care quality and support systems. This study contributes new knowledge by exploring the lived experiences of telenurses in such encounters, offering perspectives that can inform education, policy, and practice development.

The study aim was to describe health‐promoting encounters with patients in telephone counselling as experienced by telenurses.

A qualitative, phenomenological interview study, grounded in a Reflective Lifeworld Research approach, was conducted with 12 participants in western Sweden.

The findings comprise one key essence with three constituents. The essence of the phenomenon of health‐promoting encounters with patients in telephone counselling as experienced by telenurses involves a moment of confirmation and the creation of a sense of security for the patient. The phenomenon is further described with all its variations and nuances through its three constituents: creation of mutual understanding and meaningfulness, attentiveness to patients in their context, and a calm conversation without stress.

The results in this study reveal that telenurses have an intention to create mutual understanding and a sense of security to achieve meaningfulness in the encounter with patients. Confirming the patient through attentive listening and being present in the encounter facilitates a holistic perspective based on the patient as a whole, which is in accordance with a person‐centred approach. The results in this study contribute to knowledge in the area of health‐promoting encounters with patients in telephone counselling, a topic with limited research.