Liaquat Rakhshanda, Waqas Ahmed, Qadeer Tayyaba, Malik Abid, Atif Najia, Sikander Siham, Wang Duolao, Rahman Atif
Human Development Research Foundation, Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Institute of Population Health, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.
Glob Ment Health (Camb). 2025 Jan 13;12:e15. doi: 10.1017/gmh.2025.4. eCollection 2025.
Empathy plays a crucial role in psychosocial and psychological interventions, greatly impacting rapport building, patient adherence, and satisfaction with treatment. Empathetic interactions enhance patient's self-reflection and the delivery of more personalized therapeutic interventions tailored to the unique needs of each patient, thereby improving the overall quality of care. Despite empathy being central to psychosocial interventions, there are currently no valid and reliable patient-centered tools that assess the lay-therapist empathy that they show and/or exhibit toward their patients. In this study, the patient-rated Empathy Scale for Lay Therapists was developed to assess empathy in community health workers delivering psychosocial interventions. Psychometric validation was based on a cross-sectional study embedded in a non-inferiority cluster randomized trial of the Thinking Healthy Programme for perinatal depression in Pakistan. Community testing with perinatal women confirmed the scale's understandability and logical structure, highlighting its face validity. Among the 980 trial participants, a high level of agreement with the Empathy Scale for Lay Therapists (mean score 2.616) was observed, indicating effective communication and empathy from health workers. The scale demonstrated excellent internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha 0.96). Exploratory Factor Analysis revealed a unidimensional structure, capturing 87.81% of the total variance, with strong factor loadings.
同理心在心理社会和心理干预中起着至关重要的作用，对建立融洽关系、患者依从性以及治疗满意度有极大影响。富有同理心的互动能增强患者的自我反思，并提供更符合每位患者独特需求的个性化治疗干预措施，从而提高整体护理质量。尽管同理心是心理社会干预的核心，但目前尚无有效且可靠的以患者为中心的工具来评估外行人治疗师对患者所表现出的同理心。在本研究中，开发了患者评定的外行人治疗师同理心量表，以评估提供心理社会干预的社区卫生工作者的同理心。心理测量学验证基于一项横断面研究，该研究嵌入了巴基斯坦针对围产期抑郁症的“健康思考计划”的非劣效性整群随机试验中。对围产期妇女进行的社区测试证实了该量表的易懂性和逻辑结构，突出了其表面效度。在980名试验参与者中，观察到对外行人治疗师同理心量表的高度一致性（平均得分2.616），表明卫生工作者进行了有效的沟通并展现出了同理心。该量表显示出极佳的内部一致性（克朗巴哈系数为0.96）。探索性因素分析揭示了一个单维结构，解释了总方差的87.81%，且具有很强的因素负荷。
