Amaç: Araştırma, Tip 1 Diyabetes Mellitusu (DM) olan adölesanlara bakım

Objective: The research was conducted as a quasi-experimental study usinga single-group pretest post-test design to develop empathic approachesin the nurses who care for adolescents with type 1 diabetes mellitus.Methods: All the nurses working in the adolescent service at Farabi HospitalFaculty of Medical Sciences at Karadeniz Technical University participated inthe study. Implementation of empathy education program was conductedby the researcher on 8-9 August 2011. Program lasted for 16 hours totaly,eight hours a day. Data were collected using “self description document foradolescents,” “in-depth interview form,” “empathy data form for nurses,” and“nurses verbal record form.” Necessary official permissions from the hospitaladministrators were obtained. In the study, adolescents between the agesof 13 and 18 with type I diabetes mellitus for at least one year participated.Results: It was found in the study that there were little similarities, particularlyabout physical subjects, between the perceptions of patient adolescentsand nurses before the training in term of patients’ feeling of being differentand stigma; their management strategies of stress, anxiety, and fear dependingon their illness; and in terms of doing risky behaviors and of dealing withthe illness. After the training, it was found that there was a big change, particularlyemotional change, in the perception of nurses in a more comprehensiveway compared to their perception before the training. In the secondphase of the study, a total of 136 verbal communications between adolescentsand nurses were recorded before the training when patients wereadmitted to the hospital, during treatment and dinner. It was observed that80.1% of these communications performed by the nurses before the educationshowed characteristics of “non-empathic approach,” while 19.9% ofthem showed some characteristics of empathic approach, which indicatesthat nurses were more inclined to use non-empathic approaches beforethe training. When the communications after the training were observed,15.9% of 82 communications showed non-empathic characteristics, while84.1% of them showed emphatic characteristics. According to this decreasein the number of unempathic behaviors, it was seen that the nursesafter the training usedless unemphatic behaviors.Conclusion: The results of the study also showed that while the level ofunempathic approaches of the nurses before the training was much higherand they were used more often than emphatic approaches that the nursesprovided after the training. It was also seen that empathy training is quiteeffective in developing nurses’emphatic behaviors.