Trial of Listening Program for Clinical Nurses

Abstract

Purpose: This study aimed to test a tentative attentive listening program involving counseling techniques to improve empathic understanding in clinical nurses.

Methods: Thirty-five clinical nurses (2 men and 33 women) participated in this study. They underwent a tentative attentive listening program and completed a questionnaire survey comprising an empathic understanding scale and 20-item emotional mood rating before, immediately after, and two weeks after the intervention. The 90-minute program consisted of micro-technique training with a theoretical framework of modeling learning. Descriptive statistics, Pearson's product-moment correlation coefficient, and one-way repeated-measures analysis of variance were used for data analysis. This study was approved by the ethical review boards of the concerned institutions.

Results: The mean age of the participants was 42.6 years, and they were mostly in their 40s. In the 20-item emotional mood rating, the positive and negative affect scores immediately after intervention were significantly higher (p<0.05) and lower (p<0.05), respectively, than those prior to intervention. These changes converged on the baseline scores two weeks after the intervention (n.s.). The empathic understanding score immediately after the intervention was significantly higher than that before the intervention (p<0.05), and the change was maintained 2 weeks after the intervention (p<0.05). Moreover, a significant positive correlation was found between the empathic understanding score and the positive affect score immediately after the intervention (r=0.47, p=0.04).

Discussion: Elicitation of positive emotions observed after the intervention is important for promoting learning and is a key measure for evaluating the learning activity. Moreover, the improved empathic understanding is a result of conforming to the modeling responses, which demonstrates that our program increased the effectiveness of the learning process.

Conclusion: Empathic understanding in patient-nurse relationships was enhanced by the tentative attentive listening program. Therefore, it was effective for clinical nurses to master attentive listening techniques in basic communication.