Effectiveness of Professional Social Support Versus Personal and Social Network-provided Social Support

 

 

Institution

Student Name: Oscar Diaz

Course

Instructor

Date: June 25, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Effectiveness of Professional Social Support Versus Personal and Social Network-provided Social Support

Social support theory is a middle range nursing model which focuses on explaining how varied social relationships contribute to health and overall well-being of an individual. The theorist illustrates how instrumental, emotional, and information support impact one’s health behavior, utilization of health services, and overall health status. Emotional social support incorporates expression of caring, empathy, love, and trust towards the patient and families affected. Instrumental social support, on the other hand, incorporates services offered and tangible aid a patient receives from varied social support providers. Additionally, informational support includes the knowledge, suggestions, and advice an individual receives in relation to their health needs. Social support can be offered by professionals such as nurses and physicians or social networks consisting of friends, neighbors, relatives, and all other individuals who can assist patients and affected families to enhance their overall well-being (Suwinyattichaiporn & Johnson, 2022). In my personal view, social support offered by professionals such as nurses to parents of children suffering from chronic mental health is more effective compared to support offered by social networks.

The primary role of nurse practitioners is to provide holistic care to patients and their while seeking to offer emotional, instrumental, and informational support with an enhancing their participation in achieving optimum health and well-being. Professional nurses are equipped with knowledge and skills necessary for them to acknowledge the needs of parents with children suffering from chronic mental illness. Proper acknowledgement of the needs is essential to giving relevant empathetic emotional and verbal feedback to patients and affected families while showing love and respect. Emotional social support from professional nurses establishes trust between parents and nurses, which is an essential ingredient to provision of optimal instrumental caring services (Donovan & Greenwell, 2021). Aside from emotional support, professional training of nurses puts them in a better position to offer instrumental social support to parents and children living with chronic mental illness. Instrumental social support incorporates the tangible aid and services affected individuals receives. This could be psychotherapeutic interventions, which are only offered by professionals. Professional nurses can also effectively and efficiently offer informational social support. This ranges from advice, suggestion, and health education information concerning patient needs to aid parents of children with chronic mental illness make informed decisions to enhance patient health (Donovan & Greenwell, 2021).

While the nurse-provided social support would be more effective for parents of children with chronic illness, enhancing the social support provided by personal relationships and social networks for parents can be fundamental in achieving the overall well-being of the affected individuals. For instance, personal relationships characterized by trust, love, and empathy offer emotional support for individuals involved in the relationship, which is crucial to enhancing psychosocial well-being for the parents with children affected with mental illness. Similarly, social network support can influence an individual’s understanding of mental illness which is crucial to enhancing behavioral modifications to achieve well-being and optimum health. Besides, individuals who have a wide chain of supporters surrounding them are bound to receiving significant physical aid in terms of performing routine activities that sustains optimal lifestyle and emotional support to reduce overall stress surrounding the family in due to loneliness (Laird et al., 2018).

In more fundamental terms, optimal lifestyle and well-being of children living with chronic mental health illness and their families can be enhanced by efficient nurse-provided social support as well as social support provided by personal relationships and social networks. Considering the position and role of nurses in the well-being of the general population, nurse-led social support is more effective in enhancing well-being of children and parents affected with chronic mental illness. However, individual relationship and social network provided support has huge contribution to achieve optimal behavioral, psychosocial, and physiological well-being of the affected individuals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Donovan, E. E., & Greenwell, M. R. (2021). Social Support in Nursing: A Review of the Literature. Nursing Communication, 1(1), 2. Available from https://repository.usfca.edu/nursingcommunication/vol1/iss1/2

Laird, Y., Fawkner, S., & Niven, A. (2018). A grounded theory of how social support influences physical activity in adolescent girls. International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being, 13(1), 1435099. doi/full/10.1080/17482631.2018.1435099

Suwinyattichaiporn, T., & Johnson, Z. D. (2022). The impact of family and friends social support on Latino/a first-generation college students’ perceived stress, depression, and social isolation. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 21(3), 297-314. doi.org/10.1177/1538192720964922