Psychiatric nurse’s empathy, burnout and its relation with professional Quality of life

Hala Elsayes,Zebeda Elsherif:

doi:10.21608/tsnj.2017.71178

Abstract

Empathy is considered a useful skill for psychiatric nurses. It is an essential component of a caring relationship and especially critical to the provision of professional quality of life. The Aim of this study is to assess Psychiatric nurse‟s empathy, burnout and its relation with professional quality of life. This study followed a descriptive design. The present study was conducted at Tanta mental health hospital, 84 nurses. Three tools were used to collect data for the study, Tool 1:t consists of two parts Part 1; a structured interview schedules use to socio-demographic data. Part 2 Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Empathy), Tool II Maslach Burnout Inventory questionnaire and Tool III Professional Quality of Life Scale. The result reveled that there was a significant positive correlation between nurse‟s empathic concern and total burnout score at r=0.575, p=0.00 and significant positive correlation between the nurses‟ compassion satisfaction total score and their personal fulfillment at r=0.319, p=0.003. Conclusion; it was concluded that psychiatric nurses are at high risk for burnout related to imbalance between level of Compassion fatigue and satisfaction that affect the quality of life in addition to the nurses had high level of empathy concern with high level of distress .The study Recommended that the health care professionals realize what the causes and effects of burnout are, seems to be important. It is being planned to carry further, longitudinal research, in which causes of burnout will be investigated as far as correlation with empathy level is concerned. Developing educational intervention program for nurses about the empathy

Highlights

Empathy is essential component of the nurse-patient relationship and quality of nursing care
- Tools of the study were been tested for content validity by six experts three in psychiatric nursing and three in nursing services administration to ascertain the clarity and Arabic translation of the tools. - The empathy scale was found reliable in the original research and reliabilities for the subscales of burnout and for the subscales of PQOL found reliable in the original research. - Before embarking in the actual study a pilot study will be carried out on 10% of the subjects after taking their oral approval and explanation the purpose of the study to ascertain the clarity and applicability of the study tools and to identify obstacles that might be faced during data collection
(7) The present study revealed that most of the nurses reported a relatively high level of nurses‟ empathy related to the four dimensions

Summary

Introduction

Empathy is essential component of the nurse-patient relationship and quality of nursing care. Empathy capacity is a fundamental and essential instrument in all therapeutic relationships, allowing the professional to meet the needs of patients.[1] Empathy has been described in various ways; Empathy has both affective and cognitive components, and includes recognition that the source of the emotion felt is not one‟s own. Cognitive empathy is „the capacity to understand others internal states This perspective-taking ability requires an intentional process to occur, and engages executive resources such as self-regulation and cognitive flexibility. Other way described it as three components emotional, cognitive and behavioral, those relations come down to co-experiencing emotions with another person, understanding them, and solving problems. Other way described it as three components emotional, cognitive and behavioral, those relations come down to co-experiencing emotions with another person, understanding them, and solving problems. [2,3,4,5]

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