 Your new post is loading...
It may not come naturally for all doctors to let their empathy show, but new research shows that, on a neurobiological level, physicians do in fact "feel" patients' pain, as well as their relief following treatment. For the study, published online this week in Molecular Psychiatry, physicians underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging of their brains while they believed they were treating patients' pain. During the experiment, when physicians were asked to administer treatment they were told would provide pain relief, the same parts of their brain activated as they would with a placebo response, according to the Harvard-affiliated research team. By Debra Beaulieu
Few who work in the NHS have been left unperturbed by the recent damning reports into the organisation... And this is how we can reintroduce empathy into the system; starting from the top. Empathy is at the root of compassion and that cannot be attained at a distance. Cultivation of empathy and compassion also needs to be incorporated into the regular professional development of managerial as well as clinical staff. In my experience, compassion is not something that anyone can take for granted. We all have it, but we can all have lapses in it too. Most clinical staff are faced with a regular stream of emotional challenges, given the degree of suffering and distress they experience every day. And without developing the proper internal mechanisms to deal with this stress, it can easily get projected back onto the patient in cold, neglectful or even cruel behaviour. The world of psychology and mental health is increasingly waking up to the value of mindfulness and compassion centred therapies and practitioners in them, such as myself, find them equally useful for personal development as we do for clinical management. A regular practice of cultivating compassion should, therefore, be a backbone of all NHS service provision. RUSSELL RAZZAQUE
The physician-patient relationship is the cornerstone to quality medical care. A key component to this relationship is physician empathy — the ability to understand the patient’s experiences and feelings and view the world from the patient’s perspective. Empathy is so important in this day and age that medical and other health care professional schools are instituting empathy training programs and establishing empathy-related learning objectives. But, a recent study reveals that physicians might benefit from decreasing their empathy response and improve clinical outcomes By Jennifer Gibson
At the heart of the initiative is the idea that compassion can be taught. Since her arrival, Fontaine has built on that idea with the Compassionate Care and Empathetic Leadership Initiative. It’s a long title for a simple concept: Give nurses the tools to take on the challenge of facing illness and death on a daily basis, and they’ll be better prepared to help patients and families do the same. Better health care relationships, better health care . At the heart of the initiative is the idea that compassion can be taught. Nursing students keep journals reflecting on their experiences, practice tough conversations with simulated patient encounters, and attend workshops and retreats where they learn techniques to clear their minds.
The Compassionate Care & Empathic Leadership Initiative (click here to view CCELI video) exists to create dialogue around and preparedness for nurses who deal every day with people in life-changing situations–one-time or chronic illness, terminal disease, end-of-life care and even death itself–and all the highly-charged, complex issues surrounding them. The CCELI focuses on systems that optimize patients’ and their family’s quality of life, incorporate compassion and empathy into personal behavior, interprofessional interactions and encounters with patients and families. We’re developing clinical, educational and research initiatives that further those aims. Our ultimate vision is to reduce human suffering and promote health and well-being by fostering compassionate people and systems.
Patients should be confident that every nurses has the right attitude towards care, says Jan Quallington.. Nursing has come a long way as a profession since I first started out as a nurse some 30 years ago, but one area that has suffered, as the demands on hospitals and nurses have grown, is the most fundamental of all – caring and showing compassion for patients... A key step to developing compassionate, expert nurses who can cope in difficult circumstances is by changing the way trainees are selected” Dr Jan Quallington
Medical students are selected as much for their character as for their knowledge. The trait most valued (or that should be the most valued) is empathy. Ironically, studies show an erosion of empathy during medical school. Why does this happen, and what can we do about it?
We all know what empathy is, or think we do, but medical educators have struggled to define it in the context of medical care. Empathy facilitates understanding of another person's concerns, and many ascribe to empathy the emotional characteristic of feeling another's pain and suffering. But in recent years, researchers and psychometricians have come to view empathy as a primarily cognitive attribute that can be role-modeled, taught, and assessed. img http://bit.ly/dP1O76 ;
Can compassion be taught? UVa Nursing's all volunteer army of nurses, physicians, administrators, professors and students are learning concrete ways to insert compassion…
According to a study done by Dr. George Loewenstein, one of the difficulties for patients getting appropriate care for pain is the “hot/cold empathy gap.” Patients who are in pain are in a “hot” psychological state. Doctors, on the other hand, are usually in a calm, “cold” state of mind while working. The problem is that people in a “cold” state of mind are not very good at estimating how differently people in a “hot” state think – and vice versa. That is, we over-generalize how we feel onto others: if a mother is feeling chilly, she is likely to insist her child must put on a sweater, even if the child is sweaty from rough-and-tumble play.
by HAYZELL
Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, His Royal Highness made a heartfelt plea to the medical profession to foster a climate of care and compassion yesterday.'' The Health Service must learn to listen to its patients and be more caring, Prince Charles said yesterday. Modern medicine and technology are putting the ‘human touch’ at risk, according to the heir to the throne. In a heartfelt plea, he said medical schools should try to foster a climate of care and compassion among doctors. Charles’s intervention follows a series of reports of appalling treatment by NHS staff, including dying patients left screaming for water. He called on doctors and nurses to heed what patients say so they can develop the ‘healing empathy’ so badly needed.
By JENNY HOPE MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT
2. Empathy Empathy is the ability to identify with and understand another's feelings, situation and motives. As I wrote in a previous Hospital Impact article, Tony DiGioia, M.D. says the key to delivering exceptional care experiences to everyone, all the time," requires caregivers to "view all care experiences through the eyes of the patients and families." Empathy enables us to take off our own eyeglasses and put on those of the patients and families we are called to serve so as to see through their eyes. When we do so,empathy transforms "I" or "you" to "we." Fortunately, empathy is a teachable skill, which is why business schools like Harvard, hospitals like Massachusetts General and world-class companies like Zappos are training students, residents and employees alike how to understand and respond to another person's feelings. 3. Compassion
With the Affordable Care Act tying patient satisfaction to hospitals' incentive payments, patient experience efforts have been moving up the priority list. But at the Cleveland Clinic, the impetus to make it a top priority goes back to 2004, when a Harvard Business School student questioned the hospital system's lack of empathy, Cleveland Clinic CEO Delos "Toby" Cosgrove wrote yesterday in a blog post. "Dr. Cosgrove, do you teach empathy at Cleveland Clinic?" asked the student, whose father chose a more empathic hospital for surgery, despite the system's clinical reputation.
Patient experience has emerged as a dynamic issue for healthcare CEOs, physicians, and industry leaders. No provider can afford to offer anything less than the best clinical, physical and emotional experience to patients and families. As patients become savvier, they judge healthcare providers not only on clinical outcomes, but also on their ability to be compassionate and deliver excellent, patient-centered care.
The Patient Experience: Empathy and Innovation Summit is a three-day, multidisciplinary conference devoted to exploring patient experience as a key differentiator essential to the future of healthcare delivery. Click here to see the agenda from the May 20-22, 2012 Summit. The Summit will feature expert panel discussions about the national patient experience movement, providing participants from all disciplines the opportunity to identify shared challenges and inspire innovative solutions to help transform the patient experience and elevate customer satisfaction as a competitive differentiator.
|
Most of us are familiar with the saying, "It's not what you say, but how you say it." If you're a doctor, abiding by that cliche can be the difference between a lawsuit or not. According to Dr. David Wolf, a social worker and the founder of the Alachua-based Satvatove Institute dedicated to spiritually based transformative communication for self-realization, studies have shown that doctors who express more empathy toward patients have less litigation. "The empathetic response is the most effective response to create meaningful dialogue," Wolf told an audience at the Health Professions Nursing Pharmacy (HPNP) building on the University of Florida campus Thursday night. by Kristine Crane
Compassion is at the centre of nursing - and a caring relationship upholds the dignity of all involved. As the report by Robert Francis QC makes plain, such compassion deficits need to be fixed. The Prime Minister picked up on that theme when responding to the report in Parliament. He said: “Nurses should be hired and promoted on the basis of having compassion as a vocation not just academic qualifications." TONY LOBL
Dorrie Fontaine, is Dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Virginia. At the school she started the Compassionate Care & Empathic Leadership Initiative (CCELI) "which exists to create dialogue around and preparedness for nurses who deal every day with people in life-changing situations–one-time or chronic illness, terminal disease, end-of-life care and even death itself–and all the highly-charged, complex issues surrounding them. The CCELI focuses on systems that optimize patients’ and their family’s quality of life, incorporate compassion and empathy into personal behavior, interprofessional interactions and encounters with patients and families. We’re developing clinical, educational and research initiatives that further those aims. Our ultimate vision is to reduce human suffering and promote health and well-being by fostering compassionate people and systems." "Can compassion be taught? UVa Nursing's all volunteer army of nurses, physicians, administrators, professors and students are learning concrete ways to insert compassion into every patient interaction -- and they're bolstering their own resilience in the process." Culture of Empathy Builder: Dorrie Fontaine http://cultureofempathy.com/References/Experts/Others/Dorrie-Fontaine.htm
Louise Grant is Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Bedfordshire. Louise has been studying the role of empathy in fostering resilience in social workers in the UK.
She says, "My teaching interests are in children and families social work and in particular in developing reflective practice for effective social work and developing supervision knowledge and skills in social workers. My research focus is on reflective practice and developing emotional resilience for social work practice"
Louise is co-author of the study, 'Exploring Stress Resilience in Trainee Social Workers: The Role of Emotional and Social Competencies'. In order to inform the development of interventions to enhance the work-related well-being of early career social workers, this study examined several emotional and social competencies (i.e. emotional intelligence, reflective ability, empathy and social competence) as predictors of resilience in 240 trainees. Culture of Empathy Builder: Louise Grant http://cultureofempathy.com/References/Experts/Others/Louise-Grant.htm
Jodi Halpern. M.D., Ph.D, is Associate Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Joint Medical Program and the School of Public Health. As a psychiatrist with a background in philosophy, she investigates how emotions and the imagination shape healthcare decisions of clinicians and patients. She is author ofFrom Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice. Clinical Empathy: "As a psychiatrist as well as a faculty member in bioethics at UC Berkeley for almost two decades, I’ve investigated what happens to patients when their doctors show a lack of empathy. Doctors were trained to believe that emotional detachment from patients is personally and professionally necessary, but experience shows that patients don’t trust doctors who are aloof or superficially friendly. Yet, only recently have studies proven just how harmful detachment and how beneficial empathy is for healing...." Culture of Empathy Builder: Jodi Halpern
http://j.mp/T63aQf
Creating a new vision and strategy for Nurses, Midwives and Care-Givers To be a nurse, midwife or care-giver is an amazing role. There is hardly an intervention, treatment or care programme in which we do not play a significant part. They provide care, health promotion advice as well as treatment for ill health. They support the people in our care and their families when they are at their most vulnerable and when clinical expertise, care and compassion matter most. In the video below Jane Cummings, Chief Nursing Officer for England, explains the vision in more detail.
We believe that an important implication is that empathy, because of its relevance to patient outcomes and quality care, must be considered an important component of physician competence.
We strongly encourage that leaders in health care institutions and academic medical centers to go further than just declaring the desirability of empathic engagement in patient care. They should implement and assess targeted educational programs to enhance empathy in physicians in training and in practice.
Can compassion be taught? At the University of Virginia, our nascent Compassionate Care and Empathic Leadership Initiative — a lengthy, fancy name for a simple, purposeful way to teach kindness, usher resilience and nurture compassion — is seeding change in fertile ground. An all-volunteer army of more than 70 nurses, physicians, chaplains, students and others are gathering monthly to consider meaningful, relevant ways to develop our personal reservoirs of compassion, noting simple, small ways we can better care for our patients, one another and ourselves. These are concrete ways that help us to be more compassionate caregivers — ideas that could, in this season, be spread not with high-minded self-righteousness but rather with quiet kindness and empathy. Perhaps the biggest lesson is to cultivate an ability to listen to others. Not planning on what you’ll say next while another person is talking, but really hearing what is being said, taking the time to consider it before responding. And sometimes, taking what someone says and sitting with it, quietly, and thoughtfully, and even without response. Dorrie K. Fontaine is dean of the University of Virginia School of Nursing img http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nursing
Can Compassion be left to chance?
An invitation to leaders and professionals in Healthcare to consider how the core value of compassion can be “consciously orchestrated” in their organisations. By Dr. Roger Greene, Alastair Mitchell-Baker and Simon Thane. http://www.tricordant.com/pdf/case18.pdf Within this he proposes an action plan for compassion:
• Declare ‘compassion’ as a core value.
• Reward rather than punish compassionate caring.
• Hone communication and relationship skills.
• Provide space for staff to discuss difficult issues.
• Challenge models of professionalism.
• Hard-wire new behaviours.
• Declare compassion as a management and leadership competence.
• Engage health consumers in the change.
Empathy and compassion dwell at the core of the collective physician intention. We hold a noble commitment, and have taken a sober oath, to offer healing and caring to all who come to us with suffering. In the swirling eddies of our busyness, we may take shortcuts that do not demonstrate how deeply we care about our work and our patients.
It happened eight years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday. I had been invited to Harvard Business School to discuss a case study on Cleveland Clinic. After a very positive first session, a student at the second session raised her hand and said, “Dr. Cosgrove, my father needed mitral valve surgery. We knew about Cleveland Clinic and the excellent results you had. But we decided not to go because we heard you had no empathy there. We went to another hospital instead.” The student then asked me: “Dr. Cosgrove, do you teach empathy at Cleveland Clinic?”
Patient experience has emerged as a dynamic issue for healthcare CEOs, physicians, and industry leaders. No provider can afford to offer anything less than the best clinical, physical and emotional experience to patients and families. As patients become savvier, they judge healthcare providers not only on clinical outcomes, but also on their ability to be compassionate and deliver excellent, patient-centered care.
The Patient Experience: Empathy and Innovation Summit is a three-day, multidisciplinary conference devoted to exploring patient experience as a key differentiator essential to the future of healthcare delivery. Click here to see the agenda from the May 20-22, 2012 Summit. The Summit will feature expert panel discussions about the national patient experience movement, providing participants from all disciplines the opportunity to identify shared challenges and inspire innovative solutions to help transform the patient experience and elevate customer satisfaction as a competitive differentiator.
|
