Psychosocial Factors affecting health Care Workers and their impacts on Patient Education

Psychosocial Factors affecting health Care Workers and their impacts on Patient Education

Psychosocial factors have a significant impact on the delivery of quality medical care to the patient. Kumar et al. (2018) include stress, hostility, depression, hopelessness, and challenges in job control as the main psychosocial factors affecting health care workers. Another study by Asante et al. (2019) found that health workers affected by stress, burnout, and other psychosocial factors perform poorly in their interaction with the patient. Patient education is therefore negatively impacted when health workers are affected by psychosocial factors.

Psychosocial Factors affecting Patients and their Impact on Patient Education

The patient’s recovery and progress are dependent on psychosocial factors. Positive factors, including coping ability, high self-esteem, and the feeling of coherence, assist the patient’s recovery (Thomas et al., 2020). Negative psychosocial factors including exhaustion, depressiveness, hopelessness, and hostility lead to negative implications on the patient’s health progress. Therefore the patient education is impacted negatively by hostility, depressiveness, hostility, and hopelessness.

Personality Styles and Approaches to help the Patients

Five personality traits affect patient decision-making and participation in health care. According to Borgen (2020), the patient personality traits are agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, extroversion, and neuroticism. Patients with neuroticism traits are depressive and moody, and therefore they find it complicated to participate in health or make crucial decisions. Conscientious patients, on the other hand, are considered to be self-disciplined and make decisions responsibly. The individual with the openness trait is also an active participant in health care decision-making. Agreeable patients are easily cooperative, while extroverts participate more than introverts in the decision-making.

Steps in Adjustment to Illness and how Patients Copes with each Step

Patients, especially the ones suffering from chronic diseases, go through five steps of adjustment. According to Dekker and de Groot (2018), the first step to adjustment is denial. The patients do not believe that they are ill. Then anger follows where the patient will start questioning why they have become sick, and they can blame anyone or anything for their condition. Then there is the bargaining step, where the patients try to revert their conditions. At this stage, the patients even seek divine assistance to help them revert their situation. Then they fall into a depression where they feel sad and lonely. Eventually, the patient accepts their condition and resolves to cure as an adaptation method to live with their situation.