Abstract
Background
Empathy is one of the most important communication skills in clinical practice, specifically in the field of oncology. Empathic competences have a significant meaning for caring and therapeutic relations in nurses’ responsibilities. Clinical empathy brings positive performance, thus patients’ emotions are perceived and expressed more easily. Clinical empathy is contextual, interpersonal and affective, but it is also difficult to study. Awareness of oncology nurses’ perception of this phenomenon might help them to plan for more effective patient-centered consultations within interventional programs. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore the content of clinical empathy with cancer patients from the perspective of oncology nurses.
Patients and methods
In this qualitative study, 15 oncology nurses were selected by purposive sampling. A semi-structured face-to-face interview was conducted with each of the participants. After data collection, all interviews were transcribed and reviewed, and then primary codes, sub-categories and categories were extracted. The data were analyzed with the conventional content analysis method by MAXQDA 10 software.
Results
Clinical empathy showed a composite construct with five main categories, including co-presence (physical and emotional presence), metacognition (self-awareness of mental processes), perception (knowing about awareness of individuals), inherent (genetic) and didactic (instructive) nature.
Conclusion
Clinical empathy as an effective strategy can be taught through three areas of “co-presence”, “metacognition” and “perception” in the context of cancer care. Thus, clinical empathy should be considered as one of the competency standards which can be taught to oncology nurses.
Acknowledgments
This study is part of the Doctoral Thesis of MSK, which was directly supervised by CR. This study was partially financed by the School of Nursing and Midwifery of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences. We would like to thank all oncology nurses who participated in this study.
Author contributions
CR and MSK planned and designed the study. The study was supervised by CR, and MSK was the leading author for drafting of the article and responsible for identifying relevant references. JM contributed to labeling of categories and subcategories. All authors were in close collaboration and responsible for critical revisions of the manuscript. All authors contributed toward data analysis, drafting and revising the paper and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Disclosure
The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.