The two-child policy in 2019 followed by the three-child policy in 2021 added more workload and experience pressure for obstetrical nurses in China. Although the empathic and communication ability of nurses play a positive role in postpartum maternal and infant, nurse-patient relationship, improving nursing quality and patient satisfaction, the empathic and communication ability of hospital nurses were not high and the ways or methods to show the two ability of nurses were also different. Based on Rogers' empathy theory and Peplau's interpersonal relationship theory, this study explores the two ability levels of obstetric nurses after the three-child policy, so as to fill the gap for the ability research of obstetric nurses. A quantitative correlation design was used. The subjects were 90 obstetric nurses from 3 hospitals in Shandong Province. The respondents were all female, majority at ages 30 and above, with siblings, a bachelor's degree holder, had been working for 5-10 years, married and were senior nurses. Most of the Obstetric nurses or 71.11% of them had very high levels of empathic ability and 54.45% of them was at very high level of communication ability. Obstetrical nurses have a very high empathic ability specifically in perspective taking dimension, while moderately high in emotional nursing dimension and transposition thinking dimension. They had very good communication ability specially during difficult situations, emotional perception, emotional support, basic verbal, non-verbal communication, and team communication ability. Being married was found to be statistically significant in the communication ability of nurses. There were positive correlations between empathic and communication ability. The perspective taking dimension and transposition thinking dimension of empathic ability were positive correlated with each dimension of communication ability. The correlation between emotional nursing and the six dimensions of communication ability was relatively low.

Empathic Ability, Communication Ability, Obstetrical Nurses, Obstetrical Wards, Puerpera.