What Is Empathy From A Psychological Perspective As Well As The Nursing Perspective Essay

Empathy gives us as clinicians the ability to understand and connect with the client’s emotions. By building a relationship with a client it gives the clinician a better perspective of the client’s thoughts and feelings. Emotions are not something you can leave at the door and pick up later, it reflects on the individual’s performance. By simply asking how their day is going can create a conversation, this way the client can express themselves and not keep their emotions bottled up. Empathy can be cognitive or emotionally based. Cognitive empathy is being able to know what another person feels and what he/she might be thinking.

Empathy is a key helping value and has many definitions. According to Egan and Schroeder, empathy is a personality trait that allows a person to feel what others feel and have the ability to understand other people from the inside. It is also a state of feeling for others that is situation specific and can be a, “Feeling for and understand of another’s persons experiences” (Egan and Schroeder, 2009). Empathy is a “Basic value that informs and drive all helping behavior”, a communication skill and has three phases, empathic resonance, expressed empathy and received empathy (Egan and Schroeder, 2009).

Caring is thought to coincide with good nursing practice. As guided by the concept analysis framework of Walker and Avant (1983), an attempt is made to gain better understanding of the constituent properties of caring. This includes the evaluation of various definitions of caring, key attributes, antecedents, consequences, and the perception of caring from the patients and nurses point of view. Then, drawing a conclusion of the significance of caring, thereof.

The framework for creating a therapeutic relationship is built on the nurse’s ability to show empathy towards the client. Empathy is being able to put oneself in the patient’s shoes, to feel the same things they feel

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.

American Nurses Association (APA) has advocated in Improving patient outcome and the quality of healthcare provided to patients through the implication of healthcare reforms (Middleton, 2011). Post (2011) states that “A key first element of healthcare reform must be a return to compassion.” Using compassion in healthcare brings satisfaction to the patients and families which consequently creates a trusting bond between the caregiver and patient. Compassion is appreciating diversity and conducting work in a competent professional manner tailored to the patient's needs (Middleton, 2011). In healthcare, compassion goes beyond being nice, it creates awareness of the patient’s state and allows clinicians to communicate more openly with clients giving the patients a better understanding of their treatment. Nevertheless, patients are looking for more than a nurse who is “nice”, they are looking for a professional who is knowledgeable in their field and technically competent.

It is evident that nursing theorists, scholars and health care professions have varying interpretations of what caring is or should be. In the middle of all these disparity, caring is a vital component of the nursing practice and the key to choosing the concept of caring is because it is very essential when it comes to health care. This paper tries to make clear the concept of caring in the field of nursing and it makes use of the Walker and Avant outline to support the concept. It starts with recognizing the concept and its functions. It then identifies three emerging attributes of caring will be identified and a description of each will be given. At last, the paper will recognize antecedents, the effects or consequences and

At the heart of the client’s and counsellor relationship is empathy. I will look at the importance of empathy being applied within the therapeutic relationship.

Theresa Wiseman, a nursing scholar in 1996, studied professions where the relevancy of empathy was crucial and developed the following four qualities of empathy:

There has been research done to discover how patients perceive the empathy expressed by their health care providers

Caring is a term that can be tossed around freely amongst those in the nursing practice. However, in order for one to have a true understanding of what compassion is they first have to exam what the definition of caring is. Caring is defined as “Displaying kindness and concern for others; the work or practice of looking after those unable to care for themselves (Google, 2016)”. However, is caring necessarily a quality in which all nurses must possess in order to provide care to patient, families, and the healthcare environment? Jean Watson, RN, Ph.D. took on this challenge and explored the relationship between the nurse and others with the outlook of caring for rather than curing for the patient. Watson utilized the transpersonal caring theory to set a standard of nursing practice of how incorporating caring moments, relationships, and carative factors can improve the nurse client and/or family relationship

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.

In a job where patient interaction is essential, empathy will help one to acquire a better understanding of a patients’ situation. As a result, one can ask appropriate questions to receive enough information from the patient so one can provide the best help possible. Nurse educators, S Brunero, S Lamont and M Coates have reviewed the support on behalf of empathy education programs in nursing they have stated that, “By establishing an empathic response with a patient, practitioners often remark that they are better able to connect with the experiences of the patient, allowing them greater insight into how they can help the patient” (Brunero et al., 2010). In response, one can say that empathy is an essential constituent of creating a meaningful therapeutic relationship with patients in all situations. However, precautions must be taken to avoid over-stepping boundaries of the nurse-client

Nurses with empathy tend to understand and communicate with their patients more effectively. Communication in the medical field provides a sense of relief to the understanding of patients of all ages, mind-sets, medical conditions, co-workers and their families. When empathy is shown through body language, tone of voice or facial expression it benefits the communication with all different situations for a more effective work place. Empathy also shows family members you care about the patient; answering questions and putting their needs first are strong in all scenarios (Brown, 2014). Showing someone you truly care does help reassure patients and family makes healing and/or coping process easier (Stein-Parbury, 2005).

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