Читать книгу The Nursing Associate's Handbook of Clinical Skills - Группа авторов - Страница 59

Empathy and compassion

http://listen.health.org.uk/ Walk in another’s shoes

This website enables you to gain an insight into the experiences of people who engage with healthcare and social care provision. You can choose whose story you wish to engage with. It invites you to ‘walk in another’s shoes’ as a means of empathising with an individual’s experiences of healthcare and social care.

When we empathise, we actively express an awareness of what healthcare and social care feels like from the patient’s perspective. This includes validating those feelings and experiences, communicating that you are aware and do understand and that you ‘connect’ with the individual (Dougherty et al. 2015). In nursing, empathy includes maintaining an appropriate emotional distance from the patient to ensure objectivity. In order to express true empathy, the nursing associates must be able to put aside their own opinions so that these do not influence the perceptions of their patients’ experience (Jones 2019). It also requires that they emotionally distance themselves from others’ experiences; they need to see the world from their patients’ perspective without experiencing the same level of emotional response.