Compassionate communication levels of nursing students: Predictive role of empathic skills and nursing communication course

Abstract

Purpose This study aims to determine the compassionate communication levels of nursing students and the predictive roles of empathic skills and nursing communication courses. Design and Methods This descriptive study was conducted with 430 nursing students and data were analyzed using a descriptive information form, Compassionate Communication Scale (CCS), and Empathic Skill Scale (ESS). Findings A positive relationship was found between the students’ ESS and CCS scores (r = .23 p = 0.001). Empathic skills (β = 0.43, p = 0.001), predicted compassionate communication (β = 0.23, p = 0.001), compassionate conversation (β = 0.43, p = 0.001), and compassionate touch (β = 0.18, p = 0.001). Practice Implications Skills of compassion and empathy positively affect each other; therefore, it is important to adopt strategies that strengthen the empathic skills of nursing students during academic education and to include empathy and compassion in the curriculum.

The Nurses’ Perception of Expressive Touch: An Integrative Review

“…The topic of touch as an essential part of nursing practice was also identified in a descriptive survey study of 430 nursing students (57.9% of which were female) in which student nurse empathy skill scores were positively correlated to the nursing students’ compassionate communication scores. 31 Nursing student empathy scores predicted compassionate conversations and use of expressive touch. These findings indicated that nursing student empathy, an essential part of nursing practice, and nurses’ use of expressive touch as a form of compassionate communication also may be positively correlated.…”

“…These findings indicated that nursing student empathy, an essential part of nursing practice, and nurses’ use of expressive touch as a form of compassionate communication also may be positively correlated. 31 …”

Empathy ability of nursing students: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…In total, 63 articles were included for full-text review. From these, 44 unqualified articles were eliminated, such as unable to obtain full text, duplicate content or incomplete data, inconsistent research object and content, and Öztürk and Kaçan, 2022, Turkey [11] Total Kaplan and Tülüce, 2021, Turkey [12] Total Oh, 2019, South Korea [13] Total: n = 247…”

“…Xu et al, 2020, China [25] Total Zheng et al, 2020, China [26] Total: n = 472 Ge et al, 2020, China [27] Total: n = 300 Lu and Chen, 2018, China [28] Total Yang et al, 2019, China [29] Total non-cross-sectional research type. Finally, 19 studies [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] met the inclusion criteria as shown in Figure 2.…”

“…Analyses were conducted across the groups of gender of participants in 12 studies [11,12,14,15,18,22,23,[25][26][27][28][29] (Fig. 4).…”