Testing the ‘Milk of Humane Kindnesse’: preliminary results from a validation study of a scale for kindness

Background: The role of kindness in health professions has never been fully explored until now, but there is a general agreement that kindness play a crucial role in the construction of trust in health interactions. Methods: A self-report 7-point Likert Scale, Kindness Evaluation Scale (KES-2), was developped to assess the attitude to act kindly toward others. The KES was administered with empathy scale, Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), to 150 subjects (51% F, mean age 28.31 ± 9), including health professionals (51%) (MD, nurses, psychologists, students). Results: Item analysis and Exploratory Factor Analysis reduced the KES initial items set from 20 to 10, with factor loadings >0.30 on a single factor with good reliability (alpha = 0.83). Different patterns for gender and age in KES/IRI correlation emerged between health- and non-health-professions groups. Kindness was positively related to both IRI-Perspective taking (r=0.35, p= .03,) and IRI-Empathic concern (r=0.41, p= .01), among female of the non-health professions group independently of age. Among health-professions male, after controlling for age, kindness was negatively correlated to IRI-Empathic concern (r=-0.80, p= .003) and Personal distress (r= -0.69, p= .01). Conclusion: results suggest that health professions students and workers, differently than others do, seem to react to the emotional distress caused by contact with other people’s suffering by reducing their usual kindness, where gender could play a significant role. Practice implications: there is a need for further efforts on strategies to help health- professionals and students to maintain a kindness behavior in presence of the distress deriving from care for suffering persons.