Empathy in nurse-patient interaction: a conversation analysis

BACKGROUND: Considerable attention has been drawn to empathy in nursing and the concept of empathy has firmly been embedded in nursing discourse. However, little has been known about the details of how nurses express empathy to their patients. In this study, we aim to conduct a qualitative study of actual nurse-patient conversations through which empathy was achieved. METHODS: The data in this study was based on audio-recording of sessions of conversations between participating nurses and patients in two Chinese hospitals. The participants in this study involved 6 female nurses and 14 patients. Based on Bachelor’s (1988) categorization of empathy, this study described and analyzed the actual empathic sequences in nursing conversations in an attempt to demonstrate how nursing empathy was interactionally achieved using the method of conversation analysis. Conversation analysis (CA), focusing on the study of talk in interaction, is a useful method for the qualitative analysis of empathic talk in nursing. RESULTS: By drawing on prior theoretical work as well as on empathic sequence in nursing, this study described and analyzed some of the conversational resources nurses and patients used in achieving empathy. It has been shown that empathy can be interactionally and sequentially achieved in actual sequences of talk. Specifically, nursing empathy is a collaboratively constructed action instead of the nurse’s own committed action, which is produced in specific interactional contexts. CONCLUSION: Conversation analysis is a very useful method for describing and analyzing the nurse-patient interaction, especially for studying empathy in nursing care. The sequences in this study present example of exemplary empathic interaction between nurses and patients, which might shed some light on how nurses express empathy to their patients. Also, this study could help to increase the understanding of the mirco-process of empathy in nursing and contribute to improving nursing communicative skills.