Transforming empathy to empathetic practice amongst nursing and drama students

Abstract

Nurses and actors both require the ability to demonstrate empathy in their practice. Mastering communication skills and techniques can inform an empathetic response. This skill is particularly important for nurses working in paediatric palliative and end of life care but there is lack of consensus whether empathy can be taught. The process an actor follows when getting into character incorporates drawing on personal emotive experiences and necessitates being receptive to others on stage in order to 'journey' from listening and empathising to actually being a character. We have translated this practice into the way we teach nursing students to communicate empathy.

Palliative Care Stay Room – designing, testing and evaluating a gamified social intervention to enhance palliative care awareness.

“…For this reason, we designed a game that would be more memorable. We cannot forget that empathy is further fostered, as seen in the responses from our study, when they literally embody the character; when players sit in the patient's wheelchair or get as close as possible to their experience (25). Of course, it is not easy to resort to this kind of dynamic, which allows moving from storytelling to storydoing through playing the story, but it is very effective (26).…”

“…In general, the skewness and kurtosis values had absolute values lower than the two units (Lloret-Segura, et al, 2014), except for three items of the EJ dimension (2, 4 and 19) and for one item of PA (25). Given this problem of normality of the data, the scores of the dimensions were calculated by estimating a SEM model through the robust two-stage method (SAS, 2013), before and after the intervention.…”