Patients experience mental, physical, and emotional stress oftentimes. Anytime this happens, nurses offer a reassuring presence that makes healthcare treatment bearable. Empathy is a fundamental aspect of offering a person-centric healthcare service delivery.
While students study nursing in Canada, they are encouraged to master empathy as an important skill used in the nursing profession. An empathetic nurse plays an important role in building nurse-patient relationships. The positive effects of empathy are also evident in many healthcare settings.
Nurses who wish to lead in the future must be empathetic as it is the most important leadership skill in nursing. In this blog, we will study more about empathy and why it is so important for nursing leadership.
What is Empathy?
Empathy means seeing and understanding the situation of others without making any judgments. Being empathetic as a nurse requires nursing professionals to put themselves in the shoes of their patients, show a connection, and act on ideas that improve care.
Empathy comes with cognitive, emotional, and behavioural implications. Nursing professionals who show this trait assess the social cues as important signs for understanding and implementing treatment options. Empathetic care in nursing includes verbal cues, facial expressions, and body language.
Why Empathy Matters?
Empathy enhances the performance of nurses by establishing respect, encouraging positive behaviour, making moral decisions, gathering medical history, and precisely administering medicine. While completing nursing education, nurses are made to stress the importance of empathy so that they can enjoy better job satisfaction while experiencing less stress and burnout.
While getting empathetic care, patients show less stress, improved self-concept, and decreased levels of depression. Empathetic nurses also understand the needs of their patients and put the patients at ease for discussing problems and concerns.
On the other hand, a lack of empathetic care affects nurses negatively. Without empathy, patient treatment is not effective and can leave patients frustrated, neglected, and confused.
Empathy Benefits Patients:
Empathy enhances patient care considerably. When nursing professionals include empathy in their nursing practice, the outcomes are positive. Empathy leads to improved patient outcomes, boosts patient satisfaction, helps in effective communication, and also leads to patient compliance.
How Can Nurses Practice Empathy?
Nurses who are empathetic can make a difference. They can calm a patient, ease their pain and lessen their burden with simple changes and gestures. Incorporating empathy into healthcare delivery is also not so much of a difficult task.
Nurses can put themselves into the patient’s mind-set to offer better healthcare services. Thinking in terms of what their patients must be going through, managing daily activities, experiencing joy are effective ways to become empathetic.
Conclusion:
It is the responsibility of nurses to offer optimal patient care. Empathetically supporting patients and their families in their struggle with devastating diseases, injuries, and illnesses is important. The empathy that patients get from nurses can leave them with a positive mind-set when it comes to the healthcare experience.
