Why is empathy important in nursing

With patients putting a greater value on empathy than ever before, it is imperative for hospitals to understand and consistently track underlying behaviors that lead to empathetic responses, such as consistent rounding and prompt response to call bells.

Operational insights that lead to sustainable change depend on strategically developed business objectives and supporting data that offer a true measure of success or failure rather than the one-size-fits-all approach provided by HCAHPS. Empathy can dramatically improve the caregiving experience for nurses and their patients, as clinicians at Massachusetts General Hospital have discovered. The hospital is home to a research and training program that explores how empathy can benefit patients and how clinicians can best deliver it.

Its research, recently featured in the Boston Globe , reveals how establishing a positive rapport with patients can lead to better cooperation and improved outcomes for patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma, hypertension, obesity and osteoarthritis. Empathy spurs a more authentic response to patient needs and gives nurses a deeper awareness of what is going on with each individual patient. This prevents caregivers from becoming desensitized to routine tasks, such as responding to alarms on machines or helping patients out of bed.

These tasks must be handled with care each time to avoid adverse events such as falls or medication errors. Hospitals that practice empathetic care benefit from greater patient compliance, which in turn, helps them reduce readmission rates and avoid Medicare penalties.

For patients, empathy is powerful because it changes their experience. Poor communication with caregivers can leave them feeling frustrated, neglected and confused about what they need to do to improve their condition.

Whether discussing medical instructions, test results or treatment options, patients appreciate transparency and clarity. By considering the needs of patients and their family, friends and loved ones, nurses can make authentic connections that result in better care—not just when patients are admitted, but also after being released from the hospital. According to a MedCare review of more than studies, patient adherence rises by 12 percent when clinicians receive training in communication skills.

The search for empathic care must be constant, and the book author presents the necessary tools to put this ideal into practice. The set of data reported in this review serves as an incentive for the complete reading of Stephany's work.

The professional who reads this book will surely have a qualitative leap for more empathic health care and in the daily contact with people.

Abrir menu Brasil. Revista Brasileira de Enfermagem. Abrir menu. E-mail: raquel. Baron-Cohen S. Publication Dates Publication in this collection May-Jun History Received 29 Jan Accepted 19 Sept This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Google Google Scholar. The nurse initiates the topic by an indirect speech act, that is, she has heard that the patient had trouble in sleeping. In line 2, the patient offers a candidate understanding of the cause for his symptom. In line 3, the nurse first repeats the utterance produced by the patient in line 2. In this sense, by expressing a sense of shared understanding, the nurse may prevent the patient from feeling alone and isolated. At this point, it can be seen that the nurse and patient are in perfect alignment with each other in terms of sleeping problem.

It could be suggested that sharing empathy can strengthen the nurse-patient relationship and put them on equal footing. In the following extract, an instance of affective empathy is presented. In this instance, the patient has been hospitalized for almost one month. In line 1, the patient asks the nurse when he could be discharged from the hospital.

In the same turn, he continues to say that he cannot eat well and sleep well, which indicates that he is annoyed over hospitalization. In lines 3—5, the nurse says that she experienced a similar troubling situation as the patient last year, namely, being hospitalized for three weeks.

Thus, she could deeply understand that it is inconvenient for the patient to be in the hospital for a long time. It is clear that the nurse share the same feeling as the patient, namely, being uncomfortable in the hospital for a long time. This could contribute to help the nurse build emotional connections with the patient. It thus can be seen that communicating empathy is just as important as care delivery.

In the following extract, an instance of nurturant empathy is demonstrated. In line 1, the patient tells the nurse that she worries about the surgery that will be performed tomorrow. The nurse follows up on this by stating that she feels assured because the doctor, Prof. Zhang, who will do surgery for her tomorrow, is a skillful practitioner. In line 5, the nurse says that patients similar to her condition have received successful surgeries in this department last year.

The nurse attempts to convince the patient that she would just like the other cured patients in performing her surgery. Empathy is regarded as an important component in nursing care. However, little work has been done to examine how nurse and patient interact with each other in sequences of talk through which empathy is achieved. As Jones puts it, CA is a research approach that could accurately capture the contribution of both participants within nurse-patient interaction. CA could reveal the interactional process of empathy in interaction [ 30 ].

Thus, the method of conversation analysis is a useful analytical approach to the study of empathy in nursing. In this study, drawing on the method of conversation analysis, four types of empathic interactional sequences are characterized and analyzed, namely cognitive empathy, affective empathy, sharing empathy and nurturant empathy.

The present study suggests that to a certain degree empathy could contribute to a smooth sequential development and improved nursing outcome. The sequences in this study present example of exemplary empathic interaction between nurse and patient and the naturally occurring data provides very useful guidelines for professional development of clinical nurses. It is no doubt that CA provides a new way for observing and understanding nurse-patient interaction.

It unfolds the sequential organization in the nurse-patient in detail and explicates the practices and interactional sequences through which the nursing care is carried out. A conversation analytic approach presents a turn-by-turn analysis of how empathy unfolds in the course of nurse-patient interaction.

The method of conversation analysis used in this study has several limitations. For instance, we are not able to relate the use of conversational resources to the interactional outcomes, i. Furthermore, the research findings in this study do not concern all aspects of empathy in nursing. This study just addresses aspects of empathy that characterized by Bachelor [ 18 ]. CA is an inductive, micro-analytic, and predominantly qualitative method for studying language as it is used in social interaction.

The microanalytic approach used in this study is available for understanding the interactional features of nursing empathy. In this sense, Conversation analysis is a very useful method for describing and analyzing the nurse-patient interaction, especially for studying empathy in nursing care. Thus, we call for more attention to be paid to the role of conversation analysis in nursing care.

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