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This study investigates the knowledge and attitudes of the Greek public towards marine plastic pollution and the EU Single-Use Plastics Directive by interpreting the results of a questionnaire. In Greece, the issue of marine plastic pollution has been highlighted by scientists. Public consultation processes about the implementation of the Directive into the national law have been also carried out. However, the results of our study showed that participants were not informed about the issue of marine plastic pollution nor the EU Single-Use Plastics Directive. Nevertheless, they expressed positive attitudes towards it including their willingness to pay and act in order to reduce their plastic waste. Thereby, it is recommended that more initiatives should support the publicity of the Directive so that the Greek public would be able to participating in the decision-making process and support its implementation. In addition, the current study suggests that the topic of microplastics should be integrated into the context of formal education.

Introduction This paper is a report of a systematic review to identify and analyze studies of the measurement of empathy in midwives and other health professionals. Empathy has been recognized as an important factor in patient care, with positive outcomes for both patients and health professionals. There is a debate on the definition of empathy, on its measurement and on the possibility of improvement. Methods Searches were made of the CINAHL, SCOPUS, PubMed and PsychINFO databases using the terms empathy, clinical, midwifery, nursing, medical students, measurement, and health professionals, singly or in combination, to identify literature published in English between 2002-2015. The included papers were critically reviewed and a narrative synthesis was conducted. Results In all, 22 papers met the inclusion criteria by studies that were conducted to measure the levels of empathy in a variety of health professionals and students. Their scores were analyzed in correlation with their sociodemographic factors. Conclusions Despite numerous studies, many correlations but also differences exist, indicating the complexity of empathy and the need to further study it.

In recent years, a growing number of studies report on the importance of empathy to women’s care. The Midwifery Empathy Scale (M.E.S) was developed in order to study and record the levels of empathy of professional and student midwives. The purpose of our study was to validate this instrument and determine the factor structure and reliability. The study sample (n = 242) consisted of professional (n = 114) and student midwives (n = 128) of 3 Maternity Hospitals (public and private) of Athens. The exploratory factor analysis on the 25 item of Midwifery Empathy Scale (MES) revealed seven orthogonal factors (KMO Measure of Sample Adequacy = 0.817 and Bartlett’s test of sphericity = 1508.169, df = 300, p