Empathy and compassion are the backbones of the healthcare field. When taking care of patients, it is important to be empathetic and compassionate towards your patients, as this can help to build a good relationship between the nurse and the patient. Therapeutic conversations are important in nursing because being able to communicate therapeutically, will allow you to empathize with the patients, and this can lead to trusting relationships between the patient and the nurse.
According to Merriam-Webster, empathy is “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts and experiences of another.” The act of empathy applies to nursing greatly. As a nurse, you are faced with many different kinds of patients who have various kinds of problems. When you are working with patients, you have to be able to listen to what the patient is telling you, and be able to use that information to connect and empathize with that patient. This is why in nursing school, they have stressed the importance of therapeutic communication. Being able to connect with the patient on an emotional level, can help the nurse-patient relationship. If the patient is more comfortable with the nurse, then they will be inclined to tell the nurse more about how they are feeling and what is wrong.
Compassion is similar to empathy, but they are also very different. Compassion is the “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it” (Merriam-Webster). In order to have compassion for a patient, you must have empathy. If you are not able to understand or be aware of someone else’s thoughts or feelings, how will you be able to be compassionate? As a nurse, being compassionate is a must. As the definition states above, you have a desire to alleviate stress, whatever that may be. Being a nurse means that you
have to be very open-minded and caring towards others and this goes hand-in-hand with being compassionate. A nurse’s job is to care for the patients and be able to relieve their pain and suffering. But as a compassionate nurse, not only do you care for the patient, you also have to understand what the patient is going through. This can be done by simply listening to what the patient has to say. Sometimes all they need is someone to talk to. Especially now, during the COVID-19 pandemic, there are not as many visitors around, and patients get lonely. Being compassionate can help the patients to be able to heal better, which can in turn, provide better patient outcomes.
Empathy and Compassion are seen throughout all ten of Watson’s Carative Factors. The Carative factors are all about the patient and their care while they are in the hospital. They specifically tell the nurse what they need to do with the patients in order for the nurse to be successful in properly caring for their patients. In the fifth factor, it states: “Promotion and acceptance of the expression of positive and negative feelings.” This discusses the idea that was briefly mentioned in the paragraphs above about therapeutic communication. When the patient is talking to the nurse, the nurse must be engaged in the conversation. This means that they should be making eye contact (if appropriate), they should even sit down with the patient and face them and just listen to what they have to say. Empathy and compassion are intertwined in this factor, because if the nurse is actively listening to what the patient has to say and takes that into account, then this can be seen as compassionate. They are trying to alleviate the distress that the patient is having. This alone can help the patient to heal. In a different factor, the seventh one, it states “promotion of interpersonal teaching-learning.” A major role that the nurse plays in a patient’s care is teaching. If a patient for example, starts a new medication, the nurse’s job is to make sure that the patient understands why they are taking that medication and what important side effects or interactions that can occur while taking the drug. A nurse must also teach the patient if there are any specific teaching that needs to be done, such as the medication needs to be taken in the morning on an empty stomach, for example. Empathy and compassion can be seen in this factor of Watson’s Carative factors because the nurse really does care about their patients and wants to see them get better and be discharged from the hospitals. Making sure that the nurse stays engaged and enthusiastic while the patient is learning a new skill, makes them empathetic and compassionate, which goes along with all of Watson’s Carative factors.
During our short time at clinical, I feel as though I did make a difference in the patient’s care even though us student nurses could not do as much with the patients as we would have liked to. One day during my clinical rotation I was taking vital signs for one of the CNA’s and I went into a patient’s room and he was on the phone, talking to who I would soon learn was his mother. He hung up the phone once he saw me walk in and started to cry. He told me that his mother’s cancer had returned. He was upset, but I made sure to actively listen to him. It was easy for me to be empathetic and compassionate to him and his problem, because I have a similar situation with both my parents as well. I understood how he was feeling at the moment and I felt like I had a good conversation with him. It was saddening to see because I know a lot of the patients in New England Rehab are in the hospital for a while, and do not get a lot of visitors due to COVID. He really just needed someone to talk to and listen to him. I’m glad that I was able to be that person for him. My role in this specific event was that I was a listener. He just needed someone to vent to and I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I could improve my response in the future by maybe spending more time with him than I did. I was not able to stay long, as I needed to take other people’s vital signs.
I will be sure to incorporate caring behaviors into my clinical practice by continuing to get better at my communication skills. Being good at communicating is the first step in being able to be compassionate and empathetic. I think that the best way to incorporate compassion and empathy into healthcare is to be there for your patients as more than just a nurse. You should be able to have therapeutic conversations with your patients, which will then enable you to be able to be empathetic towards your patients and incorporate that into your care as a nurse.
