Statistics on empathy in care

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, increased public attention has been placed on patient dissatisfaction with the health care system – see Figure 1.  DeVoe et al. (2009) noted these trends long before the pandemic, arguing that there was a large disparity between patient experiences and perceptions of empathy in healthcare settings.  While nursing was founded on an ethic of care, patients who are the most socio-economically disadvantaged are also the least likely to experience a strong feeling of empathy and rapport from their provider (DeVoe et al., 2009).

Nurses, however, tend to demonstrate high levels of empathy in their daily practice (Rezapour-Mirsaleh et al., 2022).  For example, in one study of European nurses (n=1,580), 75% of nurses surveyed demonstrated ‘high’ empathy scores on the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (Onofrei et al., 2023).  We see this in practice, where patients frequently describe nurses as highly trustworthy, warm and caring professionals (Ahmadpour et al., 2020). Given funding constraints and environmental pressures, nursing researchers have again express concern about a decline in the prevalence of empathy within our profession.  Yi et al. (2021) explored changes in empathy among Chinese nurses from 2009 to 2018.  In this study, researchers found that nursing staff experienced a substantial and persistent decline in their capacity to empathize with the patient experience over the past ten years(Yi et al., 2021).  This trend seems to be echoed in anecdotal reports of care since the COVID-19 pandemic.

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