The Role of Empathy in Health and Social Care Professionals

The Role of Empathy in Health and Social Care Professionals is organized by AchieveCE. This course has been approved for a maximum of 2.0 Contact Hours.

Target Audience:
• Nursing
• Registered Nurse (RN)
• Advanced Practice Registered Nurse (APRN)
• Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA)
• Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN)

Activity overview:
The role of empathy plays a major role in how patients, healthcare providers (HCPs), and social care workers relate to one another. If professionals are too rushed or stressed to adequately talk to their patients, the communication will suffer greatly. They’ll be unable to develop or maintain the ability to feel the patient’s distress. Unfortunately, this is all too common in many healthcare settings, leading to untold damage from the lack of understanding. Patients may either become silent as a reaction to their HCPs or social workers’ attitudes or openly aggressive when given instructions on how to manage their own health. HCPs fail to demonstrate empathy for any number of reasons. For example, they may have stereotypes against certain types of people, or they may be judgemental of those who fail to take appropriate measures to protect their health. Frustrations can easily compound after countless patient interactions, leading to HCPs who are fundamentally jaded against their patients and bitter about their very professions.

However, a lack of empathy is not only dangerous to patient health or client welfare, but it’s also dangerous to the treatment facility or institution. It can result in poor patient care, which will, in turn, boost the liability of the healthcare professionals who treat countless patients. Contrary to popular belief, empathy is not a core trait that cannot be taught. Training courses can help professionals better conduct themselves around patients and give them every reason to comply with instructions and answer questions as honestly as possible. Empathy goes beyond pity to a much deeper place. Unlike sympathy, it’s a complex reaction tied in with cognitive as well as emotional skills. If the health or social care worker can empathize with others through a mixture of verbal and nonverbal cues, they can figure out how to best manage their patient’s health. However, when we examine how health and social care function in the workplace, it’s clear that more work needs to be done to emphasize the role of empathy in the field. If HCPs or social workers aren’t given the training and support they need, their behaviour will be difficult to challenge and change. Luckily, there are a number of effective ways to measure empathy and address a deficit. New techniques can introduce a new perspective to HCPs and social workers and give them more reasons to understand their patients on a different level.

Learning Objectives
The Role of Empathy in Health and Social Care Professionals course should leave you prepared to do the following:
• Define empathy, its benefits in the healthcare field, and the ramifications for the professionals who fail to practice it
• Discuss why health and social care professionals find it difficult to develop empathy
• Understand how HCPs can learn and grow through training seminars
• Talk about the purpose of education and how refocusing can help HCPs and social workers practice empathy even in stressful circumstances
• List the reasons empathy can actually save time and improve general productivity for professionals
• Review the verbal and non-verbal cues from patients that demonstrate their true feelings
• Assess empathy based on the qualitative methods of the Jefferson scale
• Analyze the challenges of empathy and how they can be overcome for more effective care
• Go over the cultural differences that can stand in the way of developing sufficient empathy
• Recall suggested language that can help begin and end conversations with a focus on empathy

Course Outline
Section 1: Introduction
Section 2: Material and Methods
Section 3: Results
Section 4: Conclusions