Abstract:
Nurses empathic behavior is an important aspect of caring for a patient that could convey perception and understanding about nursing practice to patients and families. This twogroup pretest-posttest quasi-experimental research aimed to examine the effect of the nursing activities with family members participation in patients using a respirator on nurses empathic behavior. A purposive sampling was used to recruit a sample of 20 caregivers of patients who used a respirator in a medical Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of a tertiary hospital in Bangkok. Ten of participants in the experimental group received the nursing activities with family members participation while the other 10 participants in the control group received usual care of the ICU. Data collection was carried out from October, 2015 to October 2016. Research instruments included the manual of the nursing activities with family members participation of patients using a respirator and the Nurses Empathic Behavior Questionnaire with the reliability of .98. Data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics and t-test. The results revealed that the differences in mean scores of nurses empathic behavior (between after and before the intervention) of the experimental group was significantly higher than those in the control group (t = -7.85, p< .001). In the experimental group, the nurses empathic behavior after the intervention was significantly higher than those before the intervention (t= 8.79, p< .001). These findings indicate that nurses could apply the nursing activities with family members participation in current practice, especially in a ward that has similar context of this study. Consequently, family members of a patient would perceive nurses empathic behavior positively.