Associations of Communication Skills Workshop and Improvements in Stress, Burnout and Empathy and Psychometric Properties of Chinese Version of Perceived Stress Scale, Professional Fulfillment and Burnout Scale and Empathy Among Health Care Professionals

The medical community is paying more and more attention to the nature of burnout, physiological, or physical stress of health care professionals (HCP). Burn out and stress not only affects the HCP themselves, but subsequently their team members, medical institutions, and patients. Recent research has found that HCP's stress, burnout, and dissatisfaction with work are associated with their practice time and leaving the job; as well as declines in quality of care, poor patient results, and medical errors.

There seems to be a two-way correlation between burn out and empathy. On the one hand, the more burn out, the lower the degree of empathy; on the other hand, the deficits in perspective substitution seems to be a risk factor for burn out. The increase in multiple perspectives and empathic attention seems prevent burn out. Other studies found that practicing clinical communication skills through practices and role-plays, and using emotional regulation methods to enable participants to express their attitudes and feelings about communicating difficult problems may help HCP improve their degree of empathy and communication skills. When such communication courses add combinations of stress management and social skills training can not only improve communication skills, increase empathy, but also prevent burnout and exhaustion.

Therefore, this study aims to explore associations of burn out, stress, communication skills, interpersonal effectiveness, and empathy level using data collected in pre- and post- assessments from 'Workshops of Enhancing Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotional Regulation, and Clinical Communication Skills'. Before and after the workshop, information regarding HCP's burn out, perceived stress, empathy level, and interpersonal effectiveness will be assessed in order to understand whether the workshop has reached its goals and teaching effectiveness. All information regarding personal data will be de-identified and encrypted. These assessments are designed to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching activities in a general teaching environment. This study will also focus on the reliability and validity analysis of the short form research measures which used. It will conduct validation studies comparing the Chinese version of the measures which used with internationally well known but long research measures to make sure the reliability and validity. If these shorter forms have well validity, it may be able to use the short and simplified questionnaires for related research in the future.