Empathy Leads To Positive Patient 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.

Empathy is therefore a vital link in the process of Emotional Intelligence. (Ioannidou, F. 2008). In relation to Nursing, it enables nurses who have well developed empathetic listening skills to establish a rapport with a patient which can assist in establishing effective solutions and building a trusting professional nurse/patient relationship. By using effective skills in empathetic communication, Nurses have the ability to divert a potential highly emotional situation into effective and positive interactions. (Halpern, J. & Ebrary 2001)

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.

Why? Because as Sutton et al, (2008, p.36.) points out “counselling is essentially about facilitating change” and sympathy and pity leaves the client stuck in the same place unable to move forward. Instead the listener must show feeling for the client, effectively trying to mirror or share their sensitivities. This also demonstrates a depth of self awareness by the listener showing that they recognise the need for a clear distinction between themselves and their client. Burnard, (1992) confirms that this also allows us to define clear boundaries within the professional counsellor-client relationship. Empathy can be communicated non-verbally by facial expression, direct eye contact and recognising the need to reduce the physical distance between counsellor and client.

Therapeutic relationship is defined as the collaboration and attachment between the client and therapist that focuses on meeting the health care needs of the client (Bordin, 1979). In this relationship, the therapist without prejudice shows Empathy, insight, understanding and acceptance of the client. Duan and Hill (1996) defined Empathy as “feeling into” the experience of the client. Over the years, the research evidence keeps piling up, and indicating a high degree of Empathy in a Therapeutic relationship is possibly one of the most potent factors in bringing about positive outcome in the therapy

Empathy involves seeing the world through the client’s eyes, thinking about things as the client thinks about them, feeling things as the client feels them, sharing in the client’s experiences. This approach provides the basis for clients to be heard and understood, and in turn, clients are more likely to honestly share their experiences in depth. The process of expressing

Empathy is a vital ingredient of supportive relationships. A lot of scholars argued that empathy furnishes health care professionals with the capacity to improve patient’s health ,thus it must be taught to make them more responsive to patient’s health [ Journal article: Developing Empathy in Nursing students:A cohort longhitudinal study page 1]

Empathy is the ability to understand the situation and share the feelings and also be able to identify a client's experiences. A counsellor must be able to imagine how it feels to be in a client's shoes and manage to understand the situation from their point of view. "Empathy has been described in different ways: walking in another's shoes, entering into another person's frame of reference or having the ability to experience life as the other person does by entering the person's world of thoughts, feelings, emotions and meanings", (Martha,2012) .In the other hand, the good counsellor still have the ability to be understanding even though the they are not agree with the client's perspective in order to solve the client's issues effectively.

After reviewing the article written by Lisa Moore, I began to reflect upon how I would incorporate empathy in my interactions with a client during the assessment phase of therapy. Empathy in a nutshell is attempting to match your feelings or current state of mind with that of another individual. In our field, empathy is of the utmost importance. It allows the speech-language pathologist (SLP) to meet clients where they are, to enter their world, and truly understand what it feels like to be them. SLP’s must not only view the client from an external frame of reference, but they must attempt to extract the client’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, beliefs, and values before and whilst administering an assessment protocol. There are several ways in

EMPATHY – with the therapist trying to feel what the client is trying to express – to understand from their (the clients) perspective not their own (the therapists) what things mean or how things feel, to themselves ( the client)

Discover new technologies in hospital to increase patient experience as well as quality of care

Problem solver’s empathy decreases with patients eventually. Empathy demonstrates core professional values which are essential but, because of working hard, stress and level of burnout among caregivers or problem solvers. Lack of empathy becomes obvious in comparison with expected percentage of side effects of this position before recruiting. So, caregivers or problem solvers should start care more about their own physical health, social life, and emotional well-being, so they start taking care of their essential

The film on empathy was very touching. I would strongly urge everyone to share this video to have others reflect on its message. I learned that in order to be truly successful in the healthcare industry, or any industry for that matter that directly deals with communicating with customers and/or patients, you must display compassion and genuine care. This film really makes you consider how you empathize in your everyday life and what you can do differently.

Empathy provides the nurse with the perspective that is necessary to consider the most appropriate actions and interventions significant to a patient’s individual experience (Boggs. 2011, p.107). Failure of the nurse to empathize with a patient can result in a strained therapeutic relationship as a result of providing inadequate emotional support and client education (Boggs. 2011, p.107). In providing empathetic care it is important to mentally picture the client’s situation and perform self-checks, thereby assessing for personal bias and stereotypes (Arnold. 2011 p. 84). Additionally, there are multiple barriers to providing empathetic care, which include lack of time, lack of trust, lack of privacy, and lack of support, amongst others (Boggs. 2011, p.115).

From a counseling stand point empathy is more meaningful than sympathy. Empathy is when we have the ability to understand and then reflect that understanding and those feelings back to the client. Sympathy is when you feel sorrow for someone else’s misfortune. Some clients come to counseling to seek sympathy and not empathy those types of clients want the counselor to feel sorry for them. Another barrier to the development of empathy could be the pressure we put on ourselves to say the right things. Empathy is about listening and acknowledging feeling and/or understanding. We may overcome these barriers by simply just listening for understanding and remembering that the counseling sessions are not for the counselor but for the client, so we must not impose our emotions and feelings on the