The Word of Adolescence That Have Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus and Empathy Development for Nurses Caring

Abstract

Objective: The research was conducted as a quasi-experimental study using a single-group pretest post-test design to develop empathic approaches in the nurses who care for adolescents with type 1 diabetes mellitus. Methods: All the nurses working in the adolescent service at Farabi Hospital Faculty of Medical Sciences at Karadeniz Technical University participated in the study. Implementation of empathy education program was conducted by the researcher on 8-9 August 2011. Program lasted for 16 hours totaly, eight hours a day. Data were collected using ``self description document for adolescents,{''} ``in-depth interview form,{''} ``empathy data form for nurses,{''} and ``nurses verbal record form.{''}Necessary official permissions from the hospital administrators were obtained. In the study, adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18 with type I diabetes mellitus for at least one year participated. Results: It was found in the study that there were little similarities, particularly about physical subjects, between the perceptions of patient adolescents and nurses before the training in term of patients' feeling of being different and stigma; their management strategies of stress, anxiety, and fear depending on their illness; and in terms of doing risky behaviors and of dealing with the illness. After the training, it was found that there was a big change, particularly emotional change, in the perception of nurses in a more comprehensive way compared to their perception before the training. In the second phase of the study, a total of 136 verbal communications between adolescents and nurses were recorded before the training when patients were admitted to the hospital, during treatment and dinner. It was observed that 80.1\% of these communications performed by the nurses before the education showed characteristics of ``non-empathic approach,{''} while 19.9\% of them showed some characteristics of empathic approach, which indicates that nurses were more inclined to use non-empathic approaches before the training. When the communications after the training were observed, 15.9\% of 82 communications showed non-empathic characteristics, while 84.1\% of them showed emphatic characteristics. According to this decrease in the number of unempathic behaviors, it was seen that the nurses after the training usedless unemphatic behaviors. Conclusion: The results of the study also showed that while the level of unempathic approaches of the nurses before the training was much higher and they were used more often than emphatic approaches that the nurses provided after the training. It was also seen that empathy training is quite effective in developing nurses'emphatic behaviors.