Do nurses and other professional helpers normally display much empathy?

Do nurses and other professional helpers normally display much empathy? Empathy, the ability to perceive and reason, as well as the ability to communicate understanding of the other person’s feelings and their attached meanings, is held to be a core characteristic of a helping relationship. This pap...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of advanced nursing 2000-01, Vol.31 (1), p.226-234
Main Authors: Reynolds, William J., Scott, Brian
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bioethics
Chronic illnesses
client needs
client responses
Clinical nursing
Empathy
health care professionals
Health Personnel - psychology
Humans
interpersonal climate
Nurse-Patient Relations
Nurses
Nurses - psychology
Nursing
Nursing Care - psychology
Nursing education
Professional relationships
Professionals
Professions
Psychologists
Students
Teachers
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Summary:Do nurses and other professional helpers normally display much empathy? Empathy, the ability to perceive and reason, as well as the ability to communicate understanding of the other person’s feelings and their attached meanings, is held to be a core characteristic of a helping relationship. This paper examines some of the observations that motivated the authors’ interest in how registered nurses learn how to offer empathy to clients. First, while empathy is crucial to all helping relationships, professional helpers do not normally offer much empathy. Second, while nurses are meant to provide helping relationships, they do not tend to show much empathy to clients. The relevance of empathy to clinical nursing and the potential consequences of low‐empathy nursing for clients is considered. It will be shown that, in the past, a low level of empathy has been reported among the helping professions, including nursing, indicating that many professional helpers are not as helpful as they ought to be. While most studies of empathy in professional relationships are more than a decade old, more recent studies report similar results.
ISSN:0309-2402
1365-2648
DOI:10.1046/j.1365-2648.2000.01242.x