Empathy and resilience in health care professionals

Abstract

Empathy and resilience have an indirect effect on raising the level of the quality of care, as empathy is the basis for good interactions between medical workers and patients, and resilience, as a dynamic process, helps caregivers adapt well to difficult working conditions, risks or traumas experienced. The development of empathy and resilience of these medical workers is possible by a training method already employed among medical students in order to both improve the quality of care, but also to more effectively prevent professional burnout. The purpose of the study was to determine the level of empathy and the level of resilience, their possible correlations with each other, as well as the relationship of these variables with socio-demographic variables.The study was carried out in 2021 among 31 doctors and 45 nurses using two main tools - the Emotional-Cognitive Empathy Questionnaire (EEP)by Ewa Wilczek-Rużyczka and the Resilience Measurement Scale(SPP-25) by Nina Oginska-Bulik and Zygfryd Juczynski, as well as a socio-demographic questionnaire.The most valuable results of the study turned out to be the demonstration of statistically significant concordant associations of empathy level with resilience level both in general, and their individual factors as statistically significant intercorrelations. In addition, statistically significant differences were shown in the case of cognitive empathy - higher levels of empathy were found among people with longer work experience and women when compared to men. In the case of the level of other components of empathy, as well as resilience, differences so as to be statistically significant could not be confirmed.It is recommended that empathy and resilience training sessions be implemented for health care workers, and that the study be continued with larger research groups, with additional control groups, to refine the programs of these training sessions.