Empathy often triggers compassion, which helps cement our social relationships.
Empathy varies with gender, age, and political preference. Both empathy and compassion can be taught using Compassion Meditation.
In 2025, the Muhammad Ali Center published a report on compassion in the United States that revealed that 61 percent of the more than 5,000 people surveyed between 2020 and 2024 said they perceived a decline in compassion in America (the Muhammad Ali Center, 2025). The majority of us apparently see wider gulfs and taller walls between groups in our world.
Lights, Camera, Empathy! The Empathy Project brings together leaders in medicine, education, entertainment, and technology to promote empathy in medicine. The project creates engaging, Hollywood-quality short films that train healthcare providers to be more humane and help empower patients to be effective participants in their own care.
Join our three-day course at the University of Leicester to master empathy teaching in healthcare. Boost patient care, overcome barriers, and lead with compassion.
Who is the course for?
This course is for educators, trainers, clinicians, and others involved in healthcare teaching or supervision. It is particularly relevant for those designing or delivering curricula in medical, nursing, or allied health education.
By the end of this course, participants will:
Comprehend different approaches to teaching empathy
Deliver confident and effective instruction on elements of empathy teaching
Grasp the variety of methods and assessment approaches needed for empathy education
Provide instruction on empathy topics
Recognise the essential elements of a successful empathy teaching
Medical students report rising stress and lowering empathy as they progress from the pre-clinical to the clinical phase of training. Transition courses can attenuate or even reverse this. We developed and evaluated a transition course at Leicester Medical School.
Approach
The transition course included:
(1) near-peer mentoring with third- and fifth-year medical students;
(2) role model training for clinical tutors;
(3) a tutorial for third-year students on identifying positive role models and
(4) an ‘empathy champion’ scheme.
The first and second components were evaluated with satisfaction surveys and interviews, the third with a satisfaction questionnaire and the fourth by counting nominated empathy champions.
And this embrace of psychopathy isn’t something new for Republicans; their disdain for empathy has deep roots that reach back a half-century or more.
Most recently, this broke into public consciousness when Elon Musk trash-talked empathy in an interview with Joe Rogan:
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization which is the empathy response. I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through, and not just be programmed like a robot.”
The “they” who are “exploiting” the “bug” of empathy are, of course, Democrats who believe one of the jobs of government is to provide for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And average Americans who think we should help the helpless, feed the hungry, heal the sick, house the homeless, provide a safety net for our elders, and care for and educate our children.
A call has gone out for professionals working in empathic healthcare to provide poster, abstract and workshop submissions for a ground-breaking international symposium.
The Global Empathy in Healthcare Network Symposium: ‘Rehumanising Healthcare in a Divided World’ will attract healthcare professionals, researchers, educators, and advocates from around the world to Leicester in September.
Professionals have until Saturday, March 16, to submit abstract and poster submissions relating to the themes of Teaching, Research, Policy or Integrated themes spanning Teaching, Research and Policy.
Empathy’s impact In the April 2024 issue of JAMA Network Open, we reported that patients treated by very empathic physicians had better outcomes than those treated by physicians with less empathy. Over 12 months of follow-up, greater physician empathy was associated with less pain intensity, fewer back-related disabilities and better health-related quality of life involving physical function, anxiety and depression, sleep health and impact on social roles and activities.
Greater physician empathy was associated with better patient outcomes than costly, risky or invasive treatments such as opioid therapy or lumbar spine surgery.
Despite such benefits associated with physician empathy, some research has shown that medical students and residents may become less empathic during their education and training. This is often attributed to the ever-growing volume of information to be learned and a perceived need for objectivity in making medical decisions, ostensibly through patient detachment and reliance on technology.
Empathy fatigue refers to the excessive empathy required of medical staff in the process of helping patients, which can produce traumatic experiences and emotional exhaustion. Severe empathy fatigue can even lead to medical disputes and errors, exacerbating increasingly tense doctor–patient relationships. Most studies on empathy fatigue focus on nurses, with few studies on physicians.
Empathy: the core of medicine In medicine, technical skills are undeniably vital, but empathy—the ability to truly connect with and understand a patient’s pain—is just as essential. This belief became even more deeply ingrained in Crabtree during the evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021. In the midst of gunfire and flames, he was called to treat a 12-year-old girl, severely burned in a brutal attack.
Empathy fatigue refers to the excessive empathy required of medical staff in the process of helping patients, which can produce traumatic experiences and emotional exhaustion. Severe empathy fatigue can even lead to medical disputes and errors, exacerbating increasingly tense doctor–patient relationships. Most studies on empathy fatigue focus on nurses, with few studies on physicians.
AI now outperforms doctors in empathy, and patients feel cared for by code.
Artificial empathy works, but techno-perfection is precarious.
When AI fluency replaces feeling, compassion risks losing its place in care.
Two years ago, I wrote "Artificial Empathy: A Human Construct Borrowed by AI." Back then, the idea that a machine could convincingly simulate compassion felt speculative. Today, we might call it empirical. A meta-analysis in the British Medical Bulletin found that in text-based clinical settings, chatbots are consistently rated as more empathic than physicians. That’s not a headline for artificial intelligence (AI) marketing; it’s a shift in how we manage and measure care.
Empathy Weaponizes Wanting Empathy, however, lives and dies in the realm of want… wants met… pain alleviated… living with the sufferer in their moment of suffering without the detached perspective needed to confront real problems… especially when the real problem is the sufferer himself… ignorance, poor choices, self-destructive patterns of thought and behavior, delusional engagements of reality.
Empathy serves wants by imagining that one is melded with the sufferer, feeling their feelings and wanting for them what they want for themselves. This is highly limiting, as noted in our previous discussion because it only proposes to enter into the suffering of certain people. You can sympathize with the perpetrator and the victim of evil acts, but you cannot empathize with them both. You’d go mad. So you have to choose.
User Friendly Churches and the Curse of Empathy I was first entering the ministry in the late 80s. “User Friendly” churches were springing up. I actually got involved with planting a “User Friendly church.” I was doubtful about the process but wanted to understand and learn. It was not very hard. Find out what people want in a church and give it to them.
International collaborations sound impressive on paper – but most fail to move beyond initial enthusiasm and a signed memorandum of understanding. Jeremy Howick shares lessons from building a global network focused on empathy in healthcare.
As the founder of the UK’s first empathy centre, focused on improving healthcare outcomes through greater understanding of patient perspectives, I am keen to seek out international best practice in this area.
What started as a conversation with a colleague about working with the other empathy specialists around the world has transformed, two years later, into a global network of 13 centres across five continents.
The power of empathetic connection Social connection is not just a vital piece of the health puzzle; it’s even more powerful than medication alone. A recent clinical trial from researchers at Dell Medical School revealed how empathy-focused phone calls from nonmedical staff drove significant improvements in blood sugar control and mental health for adults with diabetes.
The study, published in JAMA Network, followed patients at a Federally Qualified Health Center in Texas with uncontrolled diabetes. During the six-month trial, half of the patients received standard care, while the other half received standard care along with consistent phone calls from empathetic nonmedical staff.
Facilitator: Dr Rachel Winter, Associate Professor of Medical Education and Honorary Consultant in Psychiatry
About the session: This presentation explores the personal and professional benefits of empathy training for healthcare students and practitioners. While empathy is often discussed in terms of improving patient care (and it certainly does!), this session emphasises that empathy training also provides powerful support for practitioners themselves.
This session is especially timely given the current state of the NHS workforce. Across the system, healthcare professionals are experiencing low morale, high stress, and increasing levels of burnout. Many report feeling professionally isolated, emotionally exhausted, and disconnected from the core values that drew them to the profession.
Empathy training, particularly through the arts and humanities, offers a restorative space to reflect, reconnect, and rehumanise practice. By supporting emotional regulation, reducing isolation, and helping practitioners process the difficult realities of care, empathy training is not just important for patient outcomes, it's urgently needed as a tool to sustain and support those who care for others.
Learning outcomes: -Explore the evidence base for how empathy training can support practitioner outcomes -Understand the benefits of 'creative empathy' training for those who take part -Hear about opportunities to take part in 'creative empathy' training -Be aware of some everyday tools and techniques you can use to support your own learning and development
Our Educating for Empathy in Healthcare Course ran from the 22nd-24th April 2024, for leaders in healthcare education with an interest in developing, improving and delivering empathy-focussed training in undergraduate and postgraduate curricula.
"Empathy is the essence of our human connection. It is an essential part of healing – body, mind and spirit," said Maureen Sullivan, Vice President, Patient Experience & Service Excellence.
“A little empathy goes a long way," said Jennifer Lastic, Director, Experience Excellence, Office of Patient Experience. "You never know what someone you encounter is experiencing, whether a patient or family that we serve or one of own cherished colleagues."
Social disconnection, isolation, and stress are key contributors to the loneliness epidemic and mental health crisis impacting young people on college campuses today. These issues affect people of all generations in the United States and across the globe.
Feeling connected and accepted by others is a fundamental human need. In education, belonging and connection are critical factors in student success, engagement, and retention both face to face and online, on college campuses and within K–12 learning communities. In K–12 settings, both student-teacher and peer-to-peer connections are key factors in school attendance and in preventing unhealthy risk-taking behaviors and physical and mental health problems among students.
This one-day workshop is designed for healthcare practitioners, clinical educators, educational supervisors and training leads.
An increasing amount of evidence shows that empathy improves patient outcomes (including patient satisfaction) and practitioner well-being. With a keynote on the latest evidence around empathic healthcare, group work, and patient stories, this workshop will cover the theory and practice of empathy in healthcare and facilitate the development of evidence-based ‘empathy habits’ to enhance empathy in clinical practice and organisations.
This workshop will be facilitated by Dr Andy Ward, Director of Education and Training for the Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare.
Join us for a conversation with Fazlur Rahman, a hematology-oncology physician and author of Our Connected Lives. In this episode, we explore how Fazlur's journey from physician to patient transformed his understanding of empathy.
He reflects on the importance of personal connection in medicine, the impact of a lack of empathy on both doctors and patients, and the need for medical education to include the humanities to foster compassionate care. This episode dives deep into the role empathy plays in improving patient outcomes and doctor-patient relationships.
CENTER FOR EMPATHY IN HEALTHCARE IN BRAZIL Affiliated with the International Network for Empathy in Healthcare
International Network for Empathy in Healthcare
The International Network for Empathy in Healthcare, with Centers in more than seven countries around the globe and in various continents, was designed by Professor Jeremy Howick, Director of The Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare. The Center for Empathy in Healthcare in Brazil aims to develop good practices and research, offer training and promote initiatives to disseminate empathy in healthcare, and to contribute to the recognition of empathy as a fundamental component of Patient-Centered Care, the provision of quality care and the improvement of clinical outcomes in health services and in the training of professionals.
The Center for Empathy in Healthcare in Brazil brings together researchers and professionals from various fields of knowledge, thus constituting an interdisciplinary group.
Anneliese Olson, president of imaging, printing and solutions at HP, says that empathetic leadership starts with acknowledging that different workers have different needs and approaches that work for them.
“Empathy is the way that you have a dialogue,” Ms. Olson says, who was previously the senior vice-president and managing director for North America at HP, leading the go-to-market strategy for the company. “Whether you’re coaching somebody in their role, having a conversation about a difficult topic or an employee needs to raise concerns about work or things that may be going on in their personal life.”
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