Dialogue is a prerequisite for the nurse-patient relationship in nutritional care: A secondary analysis using the fundamentals of care framework

BACKGROUND: Providing good nutritional care is complex as it goes beyond assessing and ensuring the patients' dietary needs. So far, nutritional research has mainly focused on establishing evidence for the nutritional treatment, while less attention has been on the complexity of providing nutritional care. The Fundamentals of Care (FoC) describes five elements (focus, knowledge, anticipate, evaluate and trust) essential for establishing a nurse-patient relationship as a foundation for quality care. By studying how these elements shape nutritional care and dialogue, we can explore and describe the complexity of nutritional care.

AIM: By using the FoC framework as an analytic framework, this study explores how the nurse-patient relationship shapes the nutritional care of orthopaedic patients.

METHOD: This study is a secondary analysis using deductive content analysis of interviews with patients undergoing major orthopaedic surgery, nursing staff and observations of interactions between nursing staff and patients. The core dimension of the FoC framework, 'Establishment of relationship,' was used as an analytic framework.

RESULT: The nurses perceived serving meals and providing nutritional supplements as an essential part of the nutritional care. Still, the nutritional care was organised as a routine task to be less time-consuming. Appropriate care was initiated when the nursing staff explored patients´ food preferences. When the nursing staff failed to familiarise themselves with the patient's preferences, the patients interpreted nutritional care as unrelated to their needs, resulting in a lack of trust.

CONCLUSION: The need for efficiency within nutritional care must not compromise the patients' need for dialogue with the nurse. Establishing a trusting relationship between nurses and patients prevents nutritional care from becoming a routine task unrelated to the patients' needs.