Do Nurses Empathy Affects the Outcome of Care - Literature review Example

Do Nurses’ Empathy Affects the Outcome of Care? Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 Discussion 3 Conclusion 8 References 11 Discussion Empathy is a quality, which is considered important in the profession of nursing. Nurses without empathy cannot provide proper care to individuals at right place, right time for best outcome. Empathy as stated is the ability of nurses to understand the views of different patients and recognize the feeling and thoughts of the patients. It is believed that empathy is essential for the profession of nursing to provide proper care (Battarbee, Suri, & Howard, 2012). Empathy is a significant aspect for nurses and they should incorporate it to provide proper care. Empathy in a clinical environment involves an ability to communicate, understand and check the truth of the patients and get the feedback (Bloom, 2014). The need of empathy is to ensure that nurses are emotionally taking care to patients. It is believed that the best way for the practising empathy by the nurse periodically is to make contact with the patient’s situation. Nurses through empathy are able to understand the need of patients and their physical concern. However, this may not always be possible by the nurse practitioners because of some difficulties such as lack of understanding or low operating levels and time constraints. The important part of the empathy for the nurse profession is the operating level, lack of empathic services and burnout (Boyle, 2011). During my clinical practise, I have seen that empathy plays a vital role in the nursing profession. Empathy is to be regarded as the skill to see and value the need patients, their feelings and perception. Clinically, empathy plays a crucial role in understanding the perception of patients. This is a way to provide treatment to patients to ensure corrective health care. It is revealed that through empathy a strong relation amid patient and nurse is created, which helps in providing proper medication and treatment. Empathy is the skill to become sensible, aware, understand and be sensitive towards the others attitudes, behaviour and feeling (Canale, Louis, Maio, Wang, Rossi, Hojat, & Gonnella, 2012). Empathy is an intellectual situation where in the same sets of emotions are shared with the individual. Furthermore, it is also stated that the level of empathy felt by people can vary and can be determined by various factors such as the individual behaviour of the people (Cole-King, & Gilbert, 2011). I have also observed that personal communications within the technological advancement, society and shared experience is an important factor, which disturbs the level of empathy within the society and has an impact over the others. It can also be affirmed that the quality of empathising can be highly influential, which is important for the social communication among people. In addition to this, the level of empathy has been a key factor in enhancing the relation amid the nurses and patients in providing satisfaction (Decety, 2011). A part from this the concept of empathy is highly applicable to understand the behaviour of the people among others. In this regards, empathy can work as a psychological motivation while assisting people in varied situations. The concept of empathy can also be described as to apparatus that helps to think, imagine and feel in the same manner as the others do (Derksen, Bensing, & Lagro-Janssen, 2013). Empathy is an emotional ability, which can assist nurses to feel and understand the emotions, needs, intention and the thoughts of others. It is observed from the experiences that treatment is effective due to the empathetic behaviour of nurses. Due to this aspect, it is becoming important to reinforce empathy in the field of medicine. This helps in increasing efficient interaction with patients and supports them better. Hence, it can be stated that empathy in healthcare is important to provide satisfaction to patients and care. Moreover, it helps in understanding the patient better and thus helps in easy diagnosis (Keith, 2014). However, it can be also stated that empathy carries various level of emotional responses, which affects the medical situation. The necessity of having the empathy is that it will help patients to be careful regarding their health and be proactive (Martin, & DiMatteo, 2014; McColgin, 2012). Empathy has an impact in the health care sector, which aims to confirm that a person is truly empathetic. Nurses have an important role in delivering care in the general practises. A nurse has to be very careful regarding the patient’s emotions and understandings, so that the treatment is effective (Maibom, 2014; Moghaddasian, Dizaji, & Mahmoudi, 2013). During my clinical practices, I have seen that the nurse should have a good communication skill with patients so that they are able to understand the requirement of the patients and provide them with proper care. I have also seen that the nurse require to establish a strong feeling of bond with patients which is very essential to enhance the health of patients. A nurse is also required to be qualified and must be registered and is required to take further education and training to work in general practises (Misra-Hebert, Isaacson, Kohn, Hull, Hojat, Papp, & Calabrese, 2012). In my clinical practises, empathy works as an important component to enhance the quality of care and provide cognition diagnostic treatment. The effectiveness of the health care treatment is dependent upon the healthcare professional and relationship made by them with the patients. This aspect helps in providing proper care and increase the level of nursing care. This can be justified with reference to the fact that a healthcare practitioner within the worldwide healthcare sector possessing broader understanding about various healthcare aspects is able to make valid response by improvising clinical practice and delivering appropriate treatment to the end users. Under this circumstance, it is being projected that lack of understanding about such distinct healthcare aspects would certainly raise the probability of causing errors particularly in the dimensions of decision-making and clinical judgment. This ultimately leads towards generating adverse clinical outcomes in the healthcare domain (Ouzouni, & Nakakis, 2012). Similarly, in the absence of empathy towards the patient, the satisfaction level is likely to be negative. This might be owing to the reason that empathy is able to connect the conditions face by the patients and intends to address along with develop the same by promoting compassion and more importantly formulating care as well as treatment plans in an effective way. I have also identified that the communication between the healthcare practitioners and the patients encourage patient’s psychological health, and the physical responses. Hence, empathy in the healthcare environment is to understand emotions of the patients and to deliver improved care through an effective treatment plan (Raab, 2014; Riess, Kelley, Bailey, Dunn, & Phillips, 2011). In terms of recommendations concerning the identification of the key issues and addressing the same, it is to be affirmed that empathy in the above stated healthcare practice could be improved by strengthening the decision-making procedure concerning with clinical practice and establishing provisions for ensuring the deliverance of superior level of care as well as treatment to the sufferers. Apart from these, empathy in the stated healthcare practice could also be improved by considering the approach of empathy as a form of healing procedure rather than a mechanism of gathering valuable information from the patients and establishing proper communication with the needy ones. It is also seen that the empathy allows healthcare practitioners to build a high-level trust and to be connected with patients. In my practising, the empathic communication supported the health care organization to improve the level of satisfaction of patients, which lead to treatment that is more positive. The quality of the patients enhanced considerably due to the empathetic approach by nurses (Robertson, 2014). It is observed that s treatment along with empathy leads to better result, due to the strong bonding of trust that patient’s have on the healthcare professionals. Hence, clinical experience with empathetic approach of nurses leads to greater care s and enhances a good understanding with patients (Scott, 2011). Medicines along with caring attitudes of nurses help in easy recovery of patients. It is seen that the burnout seems to be a problem for the nurses. In this context, it is analysed that nurses need to be attentive and caring while providing care to patients and provide an environment, which is caring. Communication is vital for creating a strong relation between physician and patients. Therefore, nurses need to be sincere and develop a strong empathetic approach to understand the need of patients (Portnoy, 2011). I strongly believe that nurses need to display empathy while caring for easy recovering of patients. It is revealed that patients who are provided with only medicines recover latter than patients who are empathized. However, many nurses have suffered from burnout, which arises due to the emotional exhaustion, lowered sense of success and depersonalisation. Therefore, burnout is one of main reasons for high turnover of staffing (Smith, & Kemp, 2015). It also has revealed that with the prevalence of the burnout among the nurse practitioners, the quality of care will be affected and lead to dissatisfaction for patients. This may put a strain to the availability of quality care from nurses for easy recovery. Similarly, it can be also stated that burnout significantly affect the quality care, lower job satisfaction and increases personal turnover rate. This can further lead to increase in the occurrence of the burnout in the nurse practitioners (Tei, Becker, Kawada, Fujino, Jankowski, Sugihara, Murai, & Takahashi, 2014; Tateke, Woldie, & Ololo, 2013). It is revealed that empathy enhances the level of outcome as it provides better relief to people suffering from anxiety as well as distress. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that care of patients depends upon the understanding of symptoms and by communicating with patients. Hence, empathy is vital for the progress of healthcare. However, as mentioned the increasing pressure and work overload is decreasing the effectiveness of emphatic care. Furthermore, this level of pressure and the overloads of the demand of care have a significant impact on the exemption of the effective emphatic care. Thus, this attitude amongst the healthcare practitioners can significantly reduce the empathy within the healthcare. I believe that the healthcare practitioners need to understand patient’s feelings not merely as an object of care but to have an awareness of the patient’s emotions during the challenging clinical encounters (Williams, Brown, McKenna, Boyle, Palermo, Nestel, Brightwell, McCall, & Russo, 2014). Nowadays, burnout has a common place in healthcare department. Burnout not only affects the healthcare but also affects the personal life of the nurses. The consequences of burnout are the availability of poor quality service from the healthcare. It is observed by me that a burnout nurse gradually feels low and provide low quality service. It is observed that empathy sometimes leads to fatigue and creates burnout. This implies that the nurses providing care are emotionally exhausted and hence feels difficult to perform the task actively. However, it is worth mentioning that emphasizing is vital to understand the feeling of patient’s but not to sympathise (Zenasni, Boujut, Woerner, & Sultan, 2012). Thus, it is to be stated that empathy and care are important for the nursing profession as it helps to identify the thoughts of patients, which helps in providing better quality care. Conclusion In the research, it is found that the measurement of the empathy in the nursing research is required to enhance the nursing practices. Nurses with empathetic approach need to understand the thoughts and feeling of patients and deliver quality. There are no good tools for the measurement of empathy in the profession of nursing. The empathy should have some of the measures in the nursing profession to be relevant with the appropriate care. Empathy in the nursing research will assist in the development of quality in the nursing care and training programme, which aims in promoting the empathy. Empathy of a nurse leads to quality care and enhances the healthcare services. In this context, during my clinical practising I realised that a nurse is required to understand as well as express empathy to understand the feeling of patient’s. Nurses who are able to emphasize with patients recover soon as quality care is provided to patients as per requirement. However, patient expectations of getting empathetic approach have encouraged and helped in providing better quality care. However, due to the lack of emphatic approach patients might hesitate to tell the nurse about their bad mood and feeling, which is a challenge for nurses. This challenge is a serious concern for the nurse especially working in a busy clinical environment. It is observed that patient’s intensive care unit had lowered score than the other patients due to the lack of empathy. It is revealed from the discussion that empathy helps the patients to recover and remain proactive. An empathic approach is of significance not only for the nurses but also for patients to recover soon with not only medicines but also proper quality care. In this study, the intervention of the empathy consistently increased the score for the nurses to deliver better quality. The nursing profession has its own importance and issue and therefore implementing empathetic approach is vital for better treatment. However, due to the increasing demand of empathetic approach nurses face depression due to the high level of expectation from their job, which may cause a burnout in the time of their work. Therefore, a nurse must be calm at their work and could give total devotion in their work. It is finally concluded that a nurse can make a great impact in their work and make a good communication with the patients to build a strong relation. The policy and practice implications in nurses being more empathetic to their respective clients/patients could be duly measured in the form of developing certain special attributes possess by them. These attributes can be apparently observed as sense of responsibility along with attainment of the desired targets, personalisation and emotional exhaustion among others. It will be vital to mention in the concluding section that by investigating this particular subject, certain ideas have been mainly determined. One of such ideas included the contribution of empathy in making me a better practitioner in future. In this context, empathy will support me to become a better practitioner by improvising my ability towards comprehending the conditions of the patients and also building effective communication with them. The healthcare practice i.e. empathy will certainly assist me in future practice by working upon the feedbacks received from the patients and likewise taking responsive actions in opposition to the same. This practice will prove to be much beneficial for different healthcare professionals, as this would determine their capability towards offering quality care to the patients. References Battarbee, K., Suri, J.F. & Howard, S.G., 2012. Empathy on the Edge. IDEO, pp. 1-14. Bloom, P., 2014. Against Empathy. Boston Review. [Online] Available at: http://www.bostonreview.net/forum/paul-bloom-against-empathy [Accessed March 6, 2015]. Boyle, D., 2011. Countering Compassion Fatigue: A Requisite Nursing Agenda. OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, Vol. 16, No. 1. Canale, S. D., Louis, D.Z., Maio, V., Wang, X., Rossi, G., Hojat, M. & Gonnella, J.S., 2012. 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