Pretest and posttest data for nurses' empathy and problem solving

Service design is an innovative tool to improve the quality of patient experience and, therefore, it is necessary to have nurses who can implement service design. The aim of this study was to implement a training program for patient experience-based nursing service design (PEN-SD) and examine the effects of the program on clinical nurses' compassion and problem-solving ability. This study employed mixed methods: a one-group, pretest-posttest design was used as the quantitative approach and structured interviews as the qualitative approach. Twenty-one nurses were recruited from a university hospital in Korea. A PEN-SD training program was conducted from September 1 to October 6, 2018. After the training program, the participants' compassion significantly improved (p = .025) but there was no significant difference in terms of their problem-solving ability (p = .313). In the structured interviews, the participants' most common response (n = 17) was that they were able to consider problems from the patient's perspective. They also reported identifying solutions to problems through careful observation (n = 5). This research is an innovative attempt to introduce a service design in the nursing field. The PEN-SD training program was effective in improving compassion among nurses as a service development method to provide the best nursing services reflecting patients' experiences.