Nurses must walk the line between sympathy and a hard heart to avoid burnout.
Nurses must sympathize with patients to provide the complete realm of care ethically required of them. When nurses personally relate to a patient’s suffering, sympathy becomes empathy’involving a true sharing of another’s pain.
Does Sympathy Really Make a Difference?
Patients who have compassionate, sympathetic nurses develop more positive attitudes toward healing. A 2007 study conducted by Helen Wilkin and Professor Jo Silvester of City University in Great Britain, found that nurses lacking sympathy and empathy caused patients to lose confidence in treatment causing poor compliance. These patients also suffered fear, anxiety, and depression. Nurses seek to facilitate the healing of the whole person. Showing true sympathy or empathy for a patient’s pain and offering reassurance is an important part of treating holistically.
Barriers
Some barriers that block nurses’ ability to truly sympathize with patient include low job satisfaction, concern for personal well being, lack of time and burnout. Unsupportive co-workers can cause workplace anxiety that precludes nurses from actively listening to patients; thus blocking the conveyance of sympathetic communications.
Considerations
Over empathizing with patients comes with dangers for the healthcare professional. Nurses and physicians who empathize to the point of internally experiencing a version of the patient’s pain run the risk of becoming depressed, fatigued, or burned-out. These professionals may quickly exhaust all personal stress management techniques leading to a number of negative emotional manifestations.
Walking the Line Between Sympathy and a Hard Heart
The solution, of course, is not for nurses to harden their hearts toward the pain and suffering they witness, but to learn to attenuate their natural emotional response to the environment around them. This is a hard balance to achieve and it takes dedicated practice. Nurses must avoid becoming hard and cynical, but keep the gentle understanding necessary to connect with patients. In this way, they will provide a high standard of care while maintaining a healthy grasp on their personal stress levels and anxieties.
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By Samantha Gluck All Media Freelance, LLC
Samantha Gluck owns All Media Freelance, LLC where she works as a freelance health care journalist. Launched in 2011, the business has grown rapidly, requiring she add four staff writers to the AMF team. Gluck's work is featured in numerous prestigious publications, including the Houston Chronicle and the newly launched Balanced Living Magazine.Visit website | More posts by Author
Thanks, Jen, for taking the time to comment on my article. I agree that nurses and physicians could benefit from these lessons, but their studies while pursuing their initial credentials are usually so harrowing, I am at a loss to see where it would fit in the curriculum. What do you think about healthcare pros taking these studies as CEs? Continuing education, once they have gotten through their initial education work, may work better. Samantha
You don't mention social workers in this article, but I'd like to suggest that you look into some of the things social workers study in graduate school, that help them always be attentive to their own personal issues, and to appropriate boundaries. I think that nursing and medicine could both learn a lot from the type of training social workers get on this issue. They're a resource that's often overlooked in medical settings.