Nurse Credibility: A Communication Concept Analysis

As patients continue to adopt a more consumerist approach to healthcare, skills of persuasion are emerging as critical in patient care. Patient perceptions of healthcare providers affect how they attend to and process provider messages, influencing patient understandings and health decisions such as preventive behaviors and medication adherence. Credibility plays an important role in patient perceptions of healthcare providers. Credibility is especially important for nurses, who are at the nexus of the healthcare process, assisting physicians and patients alike. Nurses are expected to treat patients holistically paying attention to patients’ interpersonal needs, while also managing countless other nursing tasks and associated paperwork. Nurses who meet these demands may be viewed as clinically competent or interpersonally competent; however, nursing literature lacks a comprehensive conceptualization of nurse credibility. Because credibility plays a vital role in determining how an audience attends to and processes messages, it is essential to view nursing within the context of communication.