'Walking in their Shoes' - The Development of Education Intervention
Research type
Research Study
Full title
‘Walking in their Shoes’ – The Development of an Education Intervention on Empathy
IRAS ID
287435
Contact name
Juping Yu
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of South Wales
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 4 months, 30 days
Research summary
This application is amended from an approved project. The original plan was to collect stories from patients aged 65 and over about their healthcare experiences. The research student had recruited three patients in March before the lockdown. However, she was not able to contact them to collect their stories due to the lockdown. Following discussions with her supervisors and project partner, it prompted her to re-think to instead collect stories from NHS staff reflecting their experiences of how they demonstrate empathy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 is a highly infectious disease and has affected how both patients and healthcare professionals experience face-to-face consultation. The use of PPE may make these healthcare professionals appear intimidating and mask their non-verbal communication. In these situations, core communication skills, particularly those required to establish and maintain a supportive therapeutic relationship, are particularly important. Empathy is of particular importance in effectively establishing a therapeutic relationship with the patients. Storytelling has emerged as an innovative method for building empathy in healthcare professionals and students (Adamson et al., 2018; Charon, 2001; Miller et al., 2014). Therefore, the current study aims to develop an empathy intervention using stories from NHS staff. Between 5-10 NHS staff members such as nurses and support workers from the Aneurin Bevan University Health Board will be invited to give their stories, reflecting their experiences of how they demonstrate empathy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stories will be either be audio/video recorded as per storyteller consent. Story collection will take place virtually via video-conferencing software such as Skype/Microsoft Teams. Stories will take about 1 hour to record. Once collected, stories will be edited by the research student using audio/video editing software. All edited stories will be imported into ProShow Gold software. A video presentation about 25-50 minutes long will be produced. This video presentation will contain all the stories collected from the storytellers. This video presentation will be empathy intervention.
REC name
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REC reference
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