Define Empathy In Health Care

Empathy is a two way process, its about trying to fully understand what your client is saying and feeling and also showing your understanding to your client.

Riley (2017 pg 8) continues to say that, empathy is a dangerous notion if it’s thought to be a mindless, experimental, existential connectedness….whereas some patient encounter may require empathy; some will just be theory or experience. Contextualising empathy is therefore is difficult.

The importance of empathy in any helping profession, medical or social, cannot be overstated. The workers that exemplified it in their practice did the best that they could with their limited resources.

While in most circumstances, empathy is a crucial tool in understanding the patient and their problems, there is also a distinct line drawn between the appropriate amount of empathy and going overboard. Healthcare professionals should be aware that while empathy is an important factor of their jobs, it is just as important to not become emotionally involved in patients’ lives. A careful balancing act is needed in order to sustain the appropriate level of empathy without letting the emotional rollercoasters of patient lives interfere with the work and personal life of the healthcare professional.

If you looked in the dictionary it would tell you empathy is being able to relate or understand the feelings of another person. Which is true but it’s also being able to stand in the other person’s shoes and seeing it from their viewpoint. Many people confuse empathy and sympathy. Sympathy is the feelings towards a person but unlike empathy you are not sharing the feelings. When you show empathy you would not be

Last game of the year, the star point guard and his team are down by one point. There's 5 seconds left and he makes a move to the left, then right. He steps back and the shot goes up, bounces off the back of the rim and falls to the ground. He walks back to the bench with his head down. You're watching from the top row and can't help but feel bad for him. That's empathy, and it happens all the time, especially in the book To Kill A Mockingbird. There are three people that show the most empathy: Scout, Tom and Jem.

Conflicting messages will inevitably hinder our communication and our ability to help those we serve. The Skill of Empathy Another important skill in the field of human services would be empathy. In the last two years, I have learned the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy actually separates and isolates individuals, while empathy empowers them.

As a leader in a deployed environment, have you ever asked yourself the question, “I’m over here risking my life for these people, why aren’t they helping us find the bad guys?”, or “why can’t these people understand that we could complete this great project for them but they aren’t interested in helping themselves?!”, if so, then you likely found yourself looking across an empathy gap. Time and again we have failed in engagements due to an inability to take the perspective of other individuals. We have all seen examples of that young platoon leader engaging with local leaders in a disrespectful and counterproductive manner. As a lieutenant in Iraq during OIF I, I walked into engagements the exact same way, heavy-handed, dictatorial, and uninterested

Nevertheless, put aside of the attributes I possess, I am unable to separate empathy from sympathy. I am a very emotional person. But human service providers should have the ability of not being affected by clients’ emotions beyond understanding. Otherwise, the helping professional will not only be burned out easily, but also unable to solve customers’ problems effectively. Thus, I will keep working on distinguish empathy, which is being understanding, from sympathy, which is putting myself in the client’s positions.

Empathy– the ability to really understand what someone is going through and share those feelings with the other person. I personally believe that no everyone is capable of empathy. Some people are too selfish to see anything past their own feeling and some just plainly do not care about anything in the world. I also believe that there is a certain point in the person’s life where they feel empathy for the first and and finally experience that connection with someone. The run-in with a disease called leprosy was that point for the people described in the article “The Separating Sickness.” In the article, Rebecca Solnit writes about her “run-in” with the disease, which occurred when she visited The Louisiana Leper Home, the largest leprosy clinic that has treated many cases of that disease over the years. One of the cases that stood out to the author was a man named Eddie Bacon, who was not diagnosed in time for the doctors to salvage his legs, eye or eyebrows, but despite all of those disabilities, he survived and even got married a couple of years later.

Empathy is defined as the ability to communicate an understanding of a client’s feelings, and is a crucial component of the helping relationship (Boggs. 2011, p.106). Empathy is an essential concept to nursing practice as it allows the nurse to gain perspective in order to provide appropriate actions and interventions significant to that patient’s individual experience. In Tilda Shalof’s “A Nurses’ Story”, the author, a registered nurse in the intensive care unit (ICU), struggles with a particularly difficult patient case and must reflect upon her own values and subsequent judgments in order to provide adequate nursing care.

People are in pain. The types of pain that exist and consume our bodies at times lay dormant until awoken by some tragic event propelled our way. We have all experienced pain. From the toddler that lost her most cherished toy to the man grasping on to the slipping threads of life have felt pain in varying degrees. It is the ability to feel empathy that makes human beings, human beings, and with that empathy is how we conduct our feelings and actions. Myself, on the other hand, have been cursed with the gift of an abundance of empathy. I cannot see happily myself reporting numbers in an office building or testing my vocal abilities to a hall of congressmen and women on a mundane, relentless cycle to which I am not involved directly with the

Social Justice is defined as “the equal distribution of opportunities, rights, and responsibility despite differences in physical traits and/or beliefs and behavior. It is an international and multifaceted issue that fights for better treatment and equality of people.” (“Pachamama Alliance,” 2017). According to this definition, my understanding of social justice is that it is a way to advocate for other individuals in order to assist their needs in society. For example, I would want to advocate for Hispanic mothers and children who have been through abuse. My empathy towards this group started because of my personal history with an abusive father who suffered from alcoholism. “Empathy involves thinking about a person and the challenges he or she is facing and coming to understand what it is like for that person to have that experience.” (Cameron & Keenan, 2013, p. 72).

Empathy is the ability to understand a patient’s feelings and emotions about a particular situation. Empathy can have a big impact on how patients relate with their pharmacists. For instance, if a pharmacist is counseling a patient and the patient does not believe the pharmacist is understanding how they are feeling about taking a particular medication, then the patient might not accept the counseling of the pharmacist about the medication. Empathy can sometimes be hard to express in every situations. If a patient comes into the pharmacy really mad or angry about their current situation, then it makes it a lot harder on the pharmacist to convey empathy towards that patient. However, most situations do not involve angry patients. Most patients are usually pretty calm and are just trying to understand more about their medication and

Empathy is a feeling of putting yourself on others situation, giving caring and understanding the circumstances of someones who need help, being aware of what others felt behind his/her struggles and also a feeling you want to comfort his/her despite of their worst experiences.