Assessing Measures for Evaluating Patient Health History

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Comprehensive Health History Taking Techniques on Patients

Patient's health history stands out as paramount towards patient's treatment despite all the advances resulting to technological sophistication in medicine practices (Lloyd & Craig, 2007). In the recent past, medical advances have altered measures of diagnosing, determining and treating diseases. However, listening to patients and taking their medical history is arguably an important aspect towards assessment of ailments and patient treatment (Lloyd & Craig, 2007). In communicating with the patients, Nurses or Clinicians ought to uphold compassion, empathy and listening skills. These aspects will prevail to allow achievement of a comprehensive patient assessment and appropriate treatment. This paper presents a discussion on effective interview techniques, measures of conducting the interviews, measures of eliciting patient's interpretations and a critical evaluation of the history taking techniques.

Effective Interview Techniques in Collecting Patient's Health History

The Integrated Medical Interview

The ideal and effective patient interview technique is one that combines psychological, biological and individual's social dimension. The method allows the patient sufficient time to express themselves as the clinician or nurse deduces the underlying aspects of the disease. In this model, the core area of concern is the patient and the patient's potential to influence their outcome. Integrated medical interview combines the clinician's approach with patient-centered approach. The techniques seeks to determine, first the general condition, chief complaint, previous ailment, prior or historical medical condition, historical medical treatment, medical family history, social roots and history and other environmental factors attached to the patient.

Integrated medical interview incorporates five core steps that will facilitate efficiency and success in achieving the desired result. First step is setting up the interview stage or environment. In this step the patients is welcomed and made to feel comfortable and guaranteed of privacy. Second step is to elicit from the patient main ailment and reason for their visit. Thirdly open up history of present illness using questions that elicit exhaustive discussion from the patient. Fourth step is to ask the patient specific question on the present ailment. This serves as a continuation to step three where more clinical responses can be deduced. The fifth step is where the nurse leads the patient to arrive at more clinically accurate information on the ailment. With this line of questions, the nurse will seek to confirm the accuracy of the patient's discussions and make hypotheses on the resulting deductions (Lloyd & Craig, 2007).

Measures of eliciting patient's interpretations

During the interview, the nurse ought to sit down, maintain eye contact with the patient, displays interest by nodding and presents an interested posture at all times. While at it, the patient ought to be allowed to finish his/her story for complete information transmission (Stewart, 2003). In the process of listening to the patient's story, the Nurse should be aware through his/her respective training and experiences the probable condition suffered by the patient. While taking notes, the nurse ought to come up with diagnostic hypotheses that will facilitate further inquiry from the patient. The diagnostic hypotheses will help the nurse come up with ideal follow-up questions that will require more information from the patient (Levinson, Lesser, & Epstein, 2010). Nurses should also seek to read the patients facial expression so that to determine when the patient might be withholding information. The nurse can professionally follow up a response from the patient by asking more leading questions or asking questions in a manner to corner the patient to reveal more. Additionally, where there are suspicions of lack of sincerity, the nurse can challenge the patient's responses in a way that influences the patient to give more accurate information.

In cases where patients are being physically abused, little or no information may be obtained from the patient. The nurse should, make a note to the attending physician or advice the patient that privacy will be upheld or on legal means to attend to the matter.(Levinson et al., 2010)