Articles: empathy.
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Nurses have a longstanding history of witnessing the tragedy experienced by patients and families; however, their own reactions to profound loss and premature death have not been systematically addressed. There is a paucity of research describing interventions to prevent or minimize the ramifications of repeated exposure to traumatic events in the clinical workplace. Compassion fatigue is a contemporary label affixed to the concept of personal vicarious exposure to trauma on a regular basis. ⋯ In this article, the author begins by describing compassion fatigue and distinguishing compassion fatigue from burnout. Next she discusses risk factors for, and the assessment of compassion fatigue. The need to support nurses who witness tragedy and workplace interventions to confront compassion fatigue are described.
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J Soc Work End Life Palliat Care · Jan 2011
Narrative palliative care: a method for building empathy.
We make meaning of illness, suffering, and death through narrative, by telling a story. In this article, the authors explore narrative and palliative care: how, at the end of life, narratives of patients, caregivers, and clinicians serve to connect to those still living, and how through each telling and listening, we honor and validate the experience of suffering. A discussion of narrative competence and the skills of attention, representation, and affiliation is followed by an outline of the format for a narrative medicine workshop and a detailed analysis of an experiential exercise in close reading and reflective writing.
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Empathy is necessary for communication between patients and physicians to achieve optimal clinical outcomes. ⋯ While significant associations exist between students' self-reported scores on the JSPE and SPs' evaluations of students' empathy, the associations are not large enough to conclude that the two evaluations are redundant.
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Compassion is thought of as a nursing quality that impacts patient care. Research to describe compassion among nurses is nonexistent. ⋯ Attempts are made to measure levels of compassion rendered by the health care team, including physicians, physician's assistants, and nurses. This descriptive study is designed to explore the qualities of compassionate nurses as perceived by patients in medical-surgical units.
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Most nurses enter the field of nursing with the intent to help others and provide empathetic care for patients with critical physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs. Empathic and caring nurses, however, can become victims of the continuing stress of meeting the often overwhelming needs of patients and their families, resulting in compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue affects not only the nurse in terms of job satisfaction and emotional and physical health, but also the workplace environment by decreasing productivity and increasing turnover. ⋯ This is followed by a review of Watson's theoretical perspective related to compassion fatigue. Next we delineate symptoms of, and describe interventions for addressing compassion fatigue. We conclude by presenting a case study of a proactive nurse who avoided developing compassion fatigue and a discussion of future research needed to better prevent and ameliorate compassion fatigue.