Teaching Empathy In Health Care

As a member of the medical profession, it is painful to see a progressive decline in empathy and conscientiousness in recent years among healthcare providers especially among new doctors. Medicine is a service career and what the patients need are compassionate, conscientious and caring doctors who will be role models for all other health care providers. The noble dictum of service above self  seems to have been replaced by the new order of self first before others.  This is the major motivation why I have been teaching Medical Ethics for the last 9 years.

But how does one teach empathy? It is easier with children who with help from parents and teachers,  can develop this skill early and more naturally. With adults, it is a different ballgame.  Empathy is both cognitive and affective, innate and developed.  It is defined as the action of understanding and vicariously experiencing the feelings, motives, and thoughts of another person without explicit verbal communication. It is an active process and it calls upon sensitivity to subtle communications, imagination, and access to one one’s own past emotional experiences.  I believe that all people have empathy but in different degrees.  Studies suggest that one way to develop stronger empathic skills in students of  health courses is through role-playing and communication skills training (listening, observation, reflection, body language).   In the medical school where I teach, we have a formal curriculum from first to third year and an informal curriculum for the clerkship year.  My team and I try to be good role models to our students, letting them feel our concern for them.  But oftentimes the problem also lies in the fact that many residents and consultants don’t often show the kind of attitude that medical students need to see and emulate.  Attitudes and qualities like sensitivity to patients, respect for persons, interest and time invested in the doctor-patient relationship when observed by medical students and residents in training from their clinical mentors can reinforce what we try to teach in theory.  It would even be better if our students are exposed to an environment of caring during their time in medical school, where  they are treated with respect and concern by their teachers. By experiencing empathy while they are students, they as MD’s will give back to their patients not only empathy but kindness and conscientiousness as well.

USLS Medicine Class 2013

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, in her book Random Acts of Kindness, wrote “The world is in desperate need of human beings whose own level of growth is sufficient to enable them to learn to live and work with others cooperatively and lovingly; to care for others—not for what those others can do for you or for what they think of you, but rather in terms of what you can do for them.”