Comparisons of nurses and physicians on an operational measure of empathy.

In view of many changes taking place in today's health care marketplace, the theme of empathy in health provider-patient relations needs to be revisited. It has been proposed that patients benefit when all members of the health care team provide empathic care. Despite the role of empathy in patient outcomes, empirical research on empathy among health professionals is scarce partly because of a lack of a psychometrically sound tool to measure it. In this study, we briefly describe the development and validation of the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy (JSPE), an instrument that was specifically developed to measure empathy among health professionals (20 Likert-type items). The purpose of this study was to compare nurses and physicians on their responses to the JSPE. Study participants were 56 female registered nurses and 42 female physicians in the Internal Medicine postgraduate medical education program at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. The reliability coefficients (Chronbach's coefficient alpha) were 0.87 for the nurses and 0.89 for physicians. Results of t test showed no significant difference between nurses and physicians on total scores of the JSPE; however, multivariate analyses of variance indicated statistically significant differences between the two groups on 5 of 20 items of the JSPE. Findings suggest that the JSPE is a reliable research tool that can be used to assess empathy among health professionals including nurses.