The role of communication in nursing care for elderly people: a review of the literature.

Communication in nursing care is an important topic assessing the specific needs of elderly patients and providing nursing care that is tailored to the individual patient's needs. In this review of the literature, we describe the role attributed to communication in theoretical nursing models and we report how research in communication in nursing elderly patients has taken place over the last ten years. It appears that since the eighties there has been an increase in observation studies into nurse-patient communication. There still is, however, a lack of observation instruments to do justice to the interactive nature of nurse-patient communication. Special attention should be paid to reliability and validity