Running head: CARE REFLECTION
Empathetic and Compassionate Care Reflection
Mackenzie Stanton
University of New England
Running head: CARE REFLECTION
Introduction:
The practice of nursing is a discipline that requires empathy and compassion everyday if you have a desire to make a difference in your patients’ lives. Most people that decide to go to nursing school choose to do so in order to make a difference in the lives of people who are struggling. In order to truly accomplish this, the practice of empathy and compassion has to be omnipresent. Nothing has proven this fact more than my first clinical experience. I thought I knew how important it was to be caring and thoughtful in the midst of your patients, but after experiencing clinical, I see how it can really make a large impact whether you’re choosing to show compassion and empathy, or choosing not to.
A Clinical Experience:
Compassion and empathy are so important in every situation. Through my clinical experience I found that sometimes it can be easy to forget to show those two immensely important qualities, especially in seemingly small situations. One day at my clinical site, I had a client that was experiencing severe back pain. The client was moaning and complaining that it was a 10 out of 10 pain. In this moment, I went and found my nurse and explained the situation to her. I said that my client was experiencing tremendous pain and asked what I could do. She proceeded to get annoyed and walk back to the clients’ room. I followed her, assuming that she would talk to the client about the pain they were experiencing. Once she got to the client’s room, what transpired was not part of my expectations.
The nurse proceeded to tell the client that they had just received their pain medications 30 minutes ago and there was nothing she could do at the moment. The client responded that they
Running head: CARE REFLECTION
were in tremendous pain, and all the nurse said was “you have to wait for your medications to
kick in, there is nothing I can do for you, please only call if you need something else.” She then walked out of the clients’ room leaving me feeling like we had done a disservice to our patient. I knew that she was right in saying that the client’s medication probably was going to set in any minute, and administering more so soon wasn’t possible, however it just didn’t seem like a very compassionate way of handling the situation. What about non pharmacological methods? Or words of encouragement? It was here that I realized, this client deserved a better quality of care than what they received, no matter how many times they pulled their nurse away from a task that day.
Empathy vs Compassion:
While empathy and compassion are often used in conjuncture, and are in fact the most helpful that way, they are not the same. Empathy is described as the ability to identify and understand someone else’s feelings, while compassion is defined as a feeling of sympathy or concern for others who are struggling. Both of these qualities are important when worrying about patient care, while they are not the same thing they are much more powerful when used together rather than separately. While being able to empathize or understand what someone is going through is important, empathy alone does not compel you to want to help someone, that’s where compassion comes into play. Empathy makes it so you can provide semi educated emotional care to someone because you understand, but compassion is what motivates you to care for them, because you sympathize with them.
Jean Watson’s carative factors do a great job of demonstrating the different components that go into being a trusted caregiver. From instilling faith and hope in a client, to developing a
Running head: CARE REFLECTION
helping-trusting relationship, they are all equally important. These two carative factors are the
ones that spoke to me the most. Instilling hope may seem like a small action, but if a client has hope, it can go a long way. When a client feels like nothing they do makes anything better, it can be hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Showing the client that there is always reason to hope will improve the healing of the client tremendously, it’s amazing what the mind is capable of. As far as developing a helping-trusting relationship, how can you care for someone if they don’t trust you? It is so important to show that you care about the needs of your client and that you are capable of meeting them. I do not believe that the nurse I was working with that day demonstrated that kind of relationship to the client, however I would like to think that I may have made a difference.
Self Assessment:
After the nurse left the clients room, I pondered what I could do to make the client feel any better. I had limited skills, and limited parameters to what I was even allowed to do. However, I felt that I needed to do something, even something small. I offered the client an ice pack and said maybe they could do 20 minutes on and 20 minutes off. They gratefully accepted. After I got an ice pack and gave it to them, I stayed in the room talking with the client for a long time. We didn’t talk about anything in particular, just conversed. I could tell that the ice pack and the distraction of talking to me was making their pain even the slightest bit better. I could tell that they felt comfortable with me because I had taken the time to find any other way to make their pain better. They even told me that it felt better after sitting with me. It could have been that their pain medication finally kicked in, but even so I made them feel better for that period of time
Running head: CARE REFLECTION
while they were waiting for the pain medication to work. It was then that I knew I had developed a helping-trusting relationship like Watson’s carative factors suggests.
For this experience, I do not believe there was much I could do to improve within my parameters. I felt that I handled the situation as well as I possibly could. I will certainly take this experience with me to future nursing practice. I don’t ever want to be the kind of nurse that lacks compassion that my client experienced in that instance. There are a lot of reasons the nurse could have reacted like that, maybe she was overwhelmed with tasks that day. Even so, I would hope that I keep reactions like that to a minimum with clients when I am a practicing RN. It is a hard job, but clients have a lot on their mind and are not always aware of how hard the nurse is working for them. I will try to always remember that when I practice, and treat every client with a helping-trusting relationship like I did with this one.
Conclusion:
The two qualities I talked about in this reflection were empathy and compassion. My reflection shows that a lack of these two qualities can create a significant stress on patients, when they are already under an incredible amount of stress to begin with. It would be my hope that all nurses and healthcare professionals remember that the base of our practice is empathy and compassion. Without caring about our clients and their outcomes, the practice becomes something that human beings should not be treated with. Every client is unique and comes with unique needs. It is our job as compassionate and empathetic nurses to realize that and be prepared to adapt to each and every patient that comes our way.
Running head: CARE REFLECTION
References:
Cara, C. (2003). A Pragmatic View of Jean Watson’s Caring Theory, www.humancaring.org (under “continuing education”)
Watson, J. (2008). Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring (rev. ed.), Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
