Exploring empathy among undergraduate nursing students at universities in India and South Africa

Empathetic involvement is an essential ingredient in forming a therapeutic nurse-patient relationship, which would lead to more optimal patient care. It is one of the essential professional values possessed by nurses. This study aimed to assess empathy among nursing students at two universities on different continents.

This was a cross-sectional online questionnaire-based study conducted among the Bachelor of Science (BSc) nursing students at Yenepoya Deemed to be University (YU), India, and the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa. A total of 377 students from India and 245 students from South Africa voluntarily took part in the study. The study participants were selected based on convenience sampling techniques. A sociodemographic proforma and the Jefferson Scale of Empathy were used to collect the data. An analysis of variance (ANOVA)/t-test was computed to compare the empathy between students at two universities. The level of significance was fixed at a probability of <0.05.

On the statistical analysis, it was shown that respondents from both settings showed a higher level of empathy. Overall, students at UWC showed higher empathy scores than those at YU (P < 0.05). Empathy scores of students from UWC did not differ significantly based on their age, year of study, and ethnicity, whereas empathy scores showed significant differences for students from YU in terms of gender, year of study, and religion (P < 0.05).

In this study, the majority of respondents from both settings showed a higher level of empathy. Though students demonstrated high level of empathy, nurse educators need to pay more attention to value training, during undergraduate education for preparing the nurses to work in today's complex healthcare context.