Development of a novel empathy-related video-feedback intervention to improve empathic accuracy of nursing students: A pilot study.

BACKGROUND

Stressed family carers engage in health-risk behaviours that can lead to chronic illness. Innovative strategies are required to bolster empathic dialogue skills that impact nursing student confidence and sensitivity in meeting carers' wellness needs.

PURPOSE

To report on the development and evaluation of a promising empathy-related video-feedback intervention and its impact on student empathic accuracy on carer health risk behaviours.

DESIGN

A pilot quasi-experimental design study with eight pairs of 3rd year undergraduate nursing students and carers.

METHODS

Students participated in perspective-taking instructional and practice sessions, and a 10-minute video-recorded dialogue with carers followed by a video-tagging task. Quantitative and qualitative approaches helped us to evaluate the recruitment protocol, capture participant responses to the intervention and study tools, and develop a tool to assess student empathic accuracy.

MAIN RESULTS

The instructional and practice sessions increased student self-awareness of biases and interest in learning empathy by video-tagging feedback. Carers felt that students were 'non-judgmental', inquisitive, and helped them to 'gain new insights' that fostered ownership to change their health-risk behaviour. There was substantial Fleiss Kappa agreement among four raters across five dyads and 67 tagged instances.

CONCLUSION

In general, students and carers evaluated the intervention favourably. The results suggest areas of improvement to the recruitment protocol, perspective-taking instructions, video-tagging task, and empathic accuracy tool.