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Building a relationship with a child or young person is vital to gain their trust. Dean-David Holyoake investigates how storytelling can be a useful tool for the busy children's nurse
Abstract
Storytelling is a useful relationship-building tool to use with children, as demonstrated by the work of 'Johnny' and the author, his nurse. Five stages of narration - purpose, backstory, pivotal events, evaluation of effects and summary - encourage children to recognise and accept feelings such as anger, grief, shame and guilt in a safe way and make small steps towards change. It is feasible to start engaging children with simple everyday stories, and then go on to develop the tale so that the nurse and the child make additions as required.
Keywords
Children's nursing, storytelling, therapeutic interaction
IT IS PROBABLE that some of the first things you ever heard were stories. When you were a child your guardians might have taken great delight in telling you stories to help you nod off to sleep, entertain you or impart valuable morals to keep you safe. Some parenting traditions drift in and out of fashion, but among primary school teachers, nursery staff and in early years' centres, storytelling is still considered of crucial importance, if not the highlight of the day.
So can storytelling be a skill put into practice by nurses? The answer, of course, relates to the pressures under which most children's nurses find themselves when confronted daily with busy wards and the other priorities for their patients' welfare that seem to demote the importance of stories. This article offers some ideas for nurses about storytelling through a description of the trust-building relationship that developed between nine-year-old patient 'Johnny' and me (DH) as the nurse.
I used a five-stage model known as the 'points of a story', developed by Duvall and Beres (2007) from the work of Vygotsky (1978) and White (2005). The five stages are: purpose, backstory, pivotal events, evaluation of effects, and summary. The stages encourage isolated children such as Johnny to recognise and validate feelings such as anger, grief, shame and guilt in a safe way, and to address small steps towards change.
Purpose
Johnny, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, was six years old when he...