Kelsey Raymer
September 10, 2015
Phad 390
Empathy Essay
Empathy Essay
Empathy should play an active role in the daily lives of everyone, but in particular in the day-to-day lives of a healthcare professional. Healthcare professionals have the unique and challenging job of counseling patients in times of need, whether that is in the setting of a newly diagnosed disease or in the death of a family member. This unique challenge requires all healthcare professionals to be skilled at using empathy in the appropriate circumstances.
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.
Healthcare professionals who should learn to exhibit empathy range from doctors and nurses to therapists and pharmacists. While it has been established that a
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Some of the lacks in empathy are influenced by barriers, which help hinder a perfect score on the CARE scale. Non-physical barriers such as the rate of prescriptions being filled and the influx of needy patients, take the pharmacist’s time and attention away from patients who possibly need medication counseling. Physical barriers such as the height of the counter and the distance between the pharmacist and the patient also influence a patient’s perception of the empathy being portrayed. In the average pharmacy all of these factors come into play, resulting in the possibility of lower CARE
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.
They are too busy treating the patient’s physical illnesses that they tend to forget about the emotional and mental aspects of the care. That is why empathy is critical for nurses to achieve a better understanding of the situation, gain patient’s trust and provide the best care for them. The origin of empathy comes from the German word ‘Einfulung’ which means “feeling within.” (Stewart & William, 2002).
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).
Empathy is a complex multi-dimensional principal consisting of suitable cognitive, emotional and behavioral components. The definition of empathy allows the understanding of not only another person’s perspectives, values, and ideas but also the importance that their position has for them and their feelings in question. Empathy is a term with the objective of emphasizing the comprehension and sharing of each other’s way of thinking and their abilities. In this case, the contents of the definition of empathy are associated with nurses as they often try to understand what a patient goes through with the goal of supporting them and improve their health outcome. Thus, some of the issues that often challenge me as a nurse are related to a patient’s needs. From the definition of empathy, it is obvious that the paper intent to identify the importance of empathy in nursing and its relevance when utilized by a nurse during the interaction with patients.
Another crucial interpersonal skill which assumes a critical part in a radiographer- patient relationship is empathy. Eunson (2012) describes empathy as the emotional appreciation of another’s feelings. Not to be confused as sympathy, but empathetic people might squeeze ones hand in times of trouble, or offer kind words when one is grieving. According to research, empathy is ‘to recognise others' emotions, the reason for these emotions, and to have the capacity to take part in the emotional journey of a single person without directly be coming apart of it’ (Casselden, 1988). Needless to say,
Furthermore, compassion and empathy-related courses should be taught as part of nursing and medical students’ curriculum because it results in a lower chance of healthcare errors. Generally, patients want their provider to connect and engage with them personally and emotionally, but as nurses and doctors acquire their license or certification to practice medicine, they are not taught to be compassionate rather they are generally objective and unemotional. However, this personal and empathetic connection between patients and their provider is extremely important because patients tend to feel that sigh of relief when providers connect with them on a personal level, which in hand results in fewer healthcare mistakes. Moreover, not only does compassionate
Throughout the book A Life in Medicine, themes of compassion and empathy repeatedly resonated with me to mold my ways of thinking on a variety of important things to be considered while pursuing a career in healthcare. With this comes the responsibility to never fail to display these qualities as an example for not only patients, but my fellow healthcare providers as well. In particular, “Can You Teach Compassion” by Jerome Lowenstein places an emphasis on ensuring that you do not lose sight of your purpose in caring for people or becoming insensitive to the struggles of their realities. In the healthcare setting, the employees themselves should be considered the first patients needing to be taken care of.
In conclusion, this book showed me that empathy is a powerful communication tool that needs to be used in heath care. When I become a nurse one day, I want to show empathy to my patients and help them with their best needs (so if that means losing sleep than so be
Empathy in the importance of Nursing In a career of nursing putting the needs of patients first and looking for ways to improve their satisfaction and loyalty are the key factors of your career. The nurse's job is to nurture and feel with their patient, not for their patient. Nursing takes a toll on the Empathy that you personally have in ways of being too attached, feeling what the patients feel, and it starts to become very overwhelming in a job such as this one. When bad situations start to happen with patients, or you are not able to see them when they need you, how are you supposed to cope? Many people go towards drinking, drugs, or even the help of god when they are in need of a coping mechanism.
I agree that not enough caregivers follow the example presented in the video. This communication approach is effective and powerful also associated with patient fulfillment, better adherence to medications and lower likelihood of mistakes, and fewer malpractice cases. Empathy is a critical component of communication, particularly because this permitted him to assemble trust with his patient. While he is discussing matters with her, he makes good eye contact and he leans in which are habits that’s convey that he is present. Empathy can essentially be utilized in any profession but is vital in health care.
In my volunteer experience, I have seen only the very tip of the iceberg when facing the issue of balancing my work and empathy. I have no doubt that this issue will challenge me much more as a physician.
Empathy is simply a noun with three syllables. However, I believe having this quality is an essential in being a health care professional. To me, empathy doesn’t simply mean being able to understand the feelings of another. Empathy entails emotionally stepping into the shoes of an individual, and syncing their feelings into your own. Being empathetic allows for us to establish bonds of trust between one another, giving us insights as to what we are feeling, and ultimately contributing towards decision making. As much as I would like to say I was born with this trait, I acquired this trait later on in my life, however it was definitely was worth cultivating. During my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I volunteered at The First Church
The market opportunities for empathy are a way of life in the community. There are years of social bonding in the community environment. Empathy can be expressed without the possibility of repercussion. Empathy in the community is shared openly. The social interaction and the empathy have made a foundation for community bonding. The threat of not having a good empathic presence in the work place is vital.
There has been research done to discover how patients perceive the empathy expressed by their health care providers
As such, this value is exercised by using a therapeutic relationship between you and the client you are taking care for in good faith. Additionally, I believe that there is an immeasurable gratitude in the PPN, which as an existence of a therapeutic relationship between nurses and patients become widely seen in the nurses’ literature, such that providing an empathy is essential in effective nursing care (Kirk, 2007). For example, the medical literature validates this by recognising what’s the termed a ‘centrality of empathy approach,’ such that developing a strong therapeutic relationship between the patients, nurse, and physician is seen as an integral step in the healing process (Larson & Yao, 2005). Furthermore, various conceptualisations in the nurse context are not universally agreed upon due to different stances in the literature into empathy (Kirk, 2007). However, there are frequent appearances in the nurse’s literature from a patient’s perspective into empathy, suggesting that the patient 's perceptions of the administration of empathy by nursing staff are often lacking (Mearns et al., 2013). Most nurses focus their PPN on patient care; I believe that empathy is a challenged and complicated theory to comprehend, know-how, rehearsal, and impact. In the therapeutic relationship, this often referred to in the context of Rogers ' core