Abstract
A questionnaire survey was conducted to examine the relationship between empathy felt by nurses and their interventions to treat chronic pain. The subjects were nurses working in the departments of internal medicine and orthopedics of hospitals with more than 300 beds, and the survey items included the attributes of nurses, their feelings of empathy, and interventions to treat chronic pain. Empathy was assessed using Kakuta’s （1994） Empathic Experience Scale Revised （EESR）. The EESR categorizes empathy into the following four types ： “Type Dominant of Sharing Experience”, “Type Double-Dominant”, “Type Dominant of ISE”, and “Type Double-Recessive”, based on whether or not the person has sharing experience （SE） and insufficient sharing experience （ISE）. Questions regarding nursing intervention included 19 items related to “the viewpoint of pain assessment” and 14 items related to “methods for nursing intervention implemented to alleviate chronic pain”. Of the 19 items related to “the viewpoint of pain assessment”, the number of items to which the subjects had responded was defined as the total amount of collected information. An analysis using the χ2 test was conducted, and a significant difference was noted between the typology of empathy and question items related to nursing interventions. The results suggest that empathy felt by nurses is associated with nursing interventions provided by them, and it affects their quality.
