Nurses towards End-of-Life Situations: Sympathy vs. Empathy

Abstract

Background: Nurses providing end-of-life care play an important role in providing support to both the patient and his/her family during one of their most difficult time. Patients in this stage do not only require physical care but emotional support as well. Aside from being a care provider, nurses should be able to utilize their knowledge in therapeutic communication in order for the patients and his/her family members to verbalize their feelings and concerns. Objective: The purpose of this study is to identify whether nurses project sympathy or empathy while providing end-of-life care. It also aims to determine their lived experiences while proving care at this stage. Methodology: This study utilized the mixed convergent parallel design wherein both the quantitative research and qualitative research were employed. Result and Discussion: A factor analysis was conducted on 12 items with maximum likelihood extraction method and oblique (Promax) rotation method. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure verified the sampling adequacy for the analysis, KMO = 0.792 (“meritorious” according to Kaiser (1974)). Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity (χ2 (66) = 1007.294, p < 0.001) indicated that correlations among items were sufficiently large for factor analysis. The newly formed four-itemed factors were proven to be internally consistent (affective empathy α = 0.881, sympathy α = 0.804, and cognitive empathy α = 0.728). Correlations among the factors were r = 0.315 for affective empathy and sympathy, r = 0.295 for sympathy and cognitive empathy, and r = 0.356 for affective empathy and cognitive empathy. Emergent key themes and subthemes are based on participants’ responses. The key themes are heart-touching moments of nurses in providing end-of-life care, challenges encountered by nurses in providing end-of-life care and adaptive strategies used by nurses to the challenges they face in providing end-of-life care. Conclusion: Most nurses during end-of-life care express affective empathy, followed by sympathy and lastly cognitive empathy. Nurses are encouraged to show and practice affective and cognitive empathy rather than using sympathy in caring patient and dealing with family member in the end-of-life situations. Despite the challenges that nurses faced, they are able to provide quality care by utilizing several adaptive strategies such as listening and understanding, showing empathy, providing holistic care, being spiritual and being aware of the role as caregiver.