The Importance Of Empathy In Patient Care

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Empathy is crucial for meaningful relationships with patients1. Healthcare providers know that “bearing with the suffering of others” is an essential part of patient care2,3. Ironically, while empathic ability allows healthcare providers to notice the pain of their patients, this ability is also linked to the susceptibility to distress or compassion fatigue6,7. Compassion fatigue has been defined as ‘‘the formal caregiver’s reduced capacity or interest in being empathic and is ‘the natural consequent behaviors and emotions resulting from knowing about a traumatizing event experienced or suffered by a person’’7. Compassion fatigue can be seen as a form of burnout, as a secondary traumatic stress, associated with the ‘‘cost of caring’’2. Regulatory mechanisms must operate in people who are in contact with individuals who are in states of suffering in order to prevent their distress from impairing their ability to help5. If healthcare providers fail to regulate their emotions adequately in their interactions with their patients, they may experience feelings of being emotionally drained overtime8. In this context, supporting the mental health of healthcare providers by …show more content…

More recently, “third-wave therapies”17 address emotional regulation and emotional confrontation and are either partially or wholly based on mindfulness. Mindfulness has been defined as “the quality of awareness that includes the ability to pay attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally”18. Mindfulness may result in enhanced levels of acceptances of one’s experiences19,20. In contrast to habitually responding with avoidance strategies, adopting a stance of acceptance toward distressing thoughts and feelings (e.g. anxiety) would be expected to change the relationship with those mental

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