The Effectiveness of Empathy-Based Intervention for Nursing on Empathy and Management of Prosocial Behavior Intentions and Violent Behavior of Patients

Nurses have an undeniable role in the health system and the improvement of health services in the country has always been done by strengthening aspects related to nursing. In this regard, the present research was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of nurses' empathy-based intervention on empathy, managing pro-social behavioral tendencies, and violent acts of patients.

The current study was a semi-experimental study with a pre-test-post-test design with a control group. The statistical population of the research consisted of nurses in the 6th district hospitals of Tehran city in 2019. Among these, 40 nurses were selected using the available sampling method and randomly placed in experimental and control groups. The research tools consisted of the scale of empathy benefit (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004), the prosocial behavior tendency scale (Baumsteiger & Siegel, 2019), and the scale of attitude toward the management of aggression and violence (Duxbury, 2013). Intervention based on empathy was provided in 10 sessions for participants in the experimental group. Data analysis was done using multivariate analysis of covariance in SPSS24 software.

The results showed that the empathy-based intervention on empathy significantly increases empathy, prosocial behavioral tendencies, mutual perspective, external perspective, biological perspective, and understanding of clinical management in nurses (P<0.001). Also, 72% of the total variances of the intervention and control groups are caused by the effect of the independent variable.

Based on the findings of the present research, it can be stated that empathy is an effective structure in the efficiency of nurses. In this regard, intervention based on empathy can lead to an increase in empathy, an increase in the desire to perform pro-social behaviors, and an improvement in the attitude towards the management of patients' aggression and violence in nurses, which can ultimately lead to positive results for health systems. brought nurses and patients at different psychological, social, economic, and even physical levels.