Respond to your colleagues who selected a different patient than you, using one or more of the following approaches:

1.Share additional interview and communication techniques that could be effective with your colleague’s selected patient.
2.Suggest additional health-related risks that might be considered.
3.Validate an idea with your own experience and additional research.

ANSWER

Building a Health History: Response

Building a health history for a 16-year-old white pregnant female living in an inner-city neighborhood can be presented with numerous challenges due to the aspect of being a teenager such as you mentioned being reluctant to be open and truthful in the answers provided. The teenage girls themselves, parents, and even peers do not take teenage pregnancies smoothly. This leaves the teenage girl susceptible to fear, nervousness, rejection, guilt, and some stigmatization as they drop from school and have to learn to be mothers and parents at a tender and fragile age. Thus, when communicating and interviewing them, some recommended communication and interview techniques would be integrating adaptive listening and questioning as well as showing validation, compassion, and reassurance of the teenage girl’s feelings  (Ratna, 2019). These techniques will maximize interplay and connection between the nurse and patient, thus creating a trustworthy relationship  (Daley, Sadler, & Reynolds, 2013). This will eliminate the problem of having untruthful answers from the patient. Moreover, using the adaptive questioning/listening technique provides an opportunity where the patient can answer general questions through a YES and NO criterion and lead to specificity where she can express herself fully without obstruction. Empathy, validation, and reassurance help eliminate the fear, guilt, and anxiousness in the patient creating an amicable relationship and safe space to open up.

Moreover, in addition to the identified health risks factors in your post, age is a critical aspect to consider. She is a minority (16 years old) and a youth (a teenage girl), who is pregnant, which can be damaging to her health and that of the unborn child. She is vulnerable to poor or undesirable birth outcomes such as stillbirth or unhealthy baby  (Kirchengast, 2016), which is an added problem in addition to the socio-economic disadvantage (living in the inner city neighborhood).

References

Daley, A. M., Sadler, L. S., & Reynolds, H. D. (2013). Tailoring Clinical Services to Address the Unique Needs of Adolescents from the Pregnancy Test to Parenthood. Curr Probl Pediatr Adolesc Health Care, Vol 43(4): 71–95. doi: 10.1016/j.cppeds.2013.01.001.

Kirchengast, S. (2016). Teenage Pregnancies. In R. Laratta, A Worldwide Social and Medical Problem, An Analysis of Contemporary Social Welfare Issues (p. DOI: 10.5772/65462). IntechOpen.

Ratna, H. (2019). The Importance of Effective Communication in Healthcare Practice. Harvard Public Health Review, 23.