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The Level of Nurses’ Empathy in Operating Rooms: A Literature Review

J. Yang 1

1 The operating room, West China Hospital of Sichuan University, China

Background: Empathy is an essential quality that can promote a better nurse-patient relationship
and contribute to a positive patient outcome. There have been many studies on exploring the level of
different cohorts of nurses, however, studies on the theatre room (OT) nurses are still limited.

Objective: The literature review included searching and integrating current studies; determining
relevant themes; and exploring the gaps about OT nurses’ empathy for future research.

Methods: Seven electronic databases were used to search for relevant literature, including EBSCO
(Academic Search Complete, CINAHL Complete, Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition, MEDLINE
Complete, SocINDEX with Full Text), Cochrane Library, Health Research Premium Collection, PubMed,
Public Available Content Database (ProQuest), Science Direct and Scopus.

Results: A total of 441 and 1689 articles were yielded respectively in the two search strategies. After
deduplication (n1= 39, n2= 696) were removed in Zotero, the title and abstracts were screened. 392
and 594 were excluded because targeted populations were nursing students, nursing participants
with physicians or patients. Further critically read in full text (n1= 10, n2= 53) to assess eligibility. In total,
14 (n1=3, n2=11) articles were deemed to meet the edibility criteria for the review. A summary of the
selection process is presented in Appendix C and Appendix D, respectively. After analyzing and
synthesizing the studies, three themes were emerged:
Empathy among different nursing cohorts
Empathy among OT nurses
Oral Presentation Abstracts
The evaluation of empathy scales for application to OT nurses

Conclusion: It is essential to explore more studies on OT nurses’ empathy due to the lack of
evidence-based information, and the influencing factors are still unclear. Future studies should select
appropriate scales to evaluate the level of empathy on OT nurses taking the OR working environment
and patient characteristics into consideration.

Keywords: preoperative nursing, nurse, empathy

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Correspondence: Jiaqi Yang, the operating room, West China Hospital of Sichuan University, China
E-mail: 346610668@qq.com

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