Empathy In Health Care

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A Heart to Heart - a short play on empathy in healthcare

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By listening and communicating we can understand and guide our patients. Empathy enhances patient-physician communication and trust, and therefore treatment effectiveness. Why is engagement so important? When patients are engaged with their doctors and nurses they can feel empowered and are better able to participate in their own health and well being. Understanding and guidance is essential. Patients need understanding and guidance. They need to learn that it's okay to ask questions and to take charge. They need to learn that they can be empowered, proactive and in charge of their health and well being no matter who they are. While some patients are savvy, there are patients who feel intimidated to be assertive. They don't know how to ask questions or to speak up, but they can learn.

As professionals we can help them. We can guide them and encourage them to take to charge of their health care. We can let them know that it's okay to write their questions in a notebook, and to take important notes so that they don't forget what is being told to them. I love talking with patients and families. And whenever a patient or family member has many questions, typically, they apologize for asking so many questions, but I encourage it. It's wonderful that they have so many; it demonstrates to me that they are interested in their health care, and I let them know that they do not need to apologize for asking questions. We can empower our patients to manage their disease, to take control of their lives and their own care.

Let's look at how advertising agencies engage consumers, and how doctors and nurses can learn from them. Advertising agencies are masters at connecting with consumers. They easily engage them. How do ads engage consumers? Picture a commercial you would see during the super bowl or an ad in your favorite magazine. How do doctors, nurses and other clinicians capture their patients' attention, engage them and help them react to take charge of their health care?

Capture attention: Though a genuine and motivating conversation. Foster trust and respect. Talk with patients listen to them and understand them, hear their story, and know your patients. Help them react: Inspire them to value their health with understanding and guidance. Help them become compliant; help them improve adherence, follow treatment plan. The way advertisers want consumers to react to buy products, health professionals want patients to react.

They want them to be compliant and adhere to their treatment plan; and to become empowered to take charge and well being. Engage with empathy and heart. If we engage with empathy and heart we can help empower patients to take charge of their health and well being. It is how we make them feel that counts. Your turn We would love for you to share your insights. For the health professionals, what are your feelings about engaging your patients with empathy?

For patients, are your health professionals empathetic? Is there something different that you would like to see your health professionals do? For more on this topic and to read comments, you will find it here. More on Healthin Journalist; Founder, BarbaraFicarra. News U. Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism. Special Projects Highline. HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Follow Us. Terms Privacy Policy. It is with empathy that we can engage and empower our patients. Capture attention.

Engage the consumer. While sympathy and compassion and are related to empathy, there are important differences. Compassion and sympathy are often thought to involve more of a passive connection, while empathy generally involves a much more active attempt to understand another person. Human beings are certainly capable of selfish, even cruel, behavior. A quick scan of any daily newspaper quickly reveals numerous unkind, selfish, and heinous actions. The question then is why don't we all engage in such self-serving behavior all the time? What is it that causes us to feel another's pain and respond with kindness?

There are a number of benefits of being able to experience empathy:. Not everyone experiences empathy in every situation. Some people may be more naturally empathetic in general, but people also tend to feel more empathetic towards some people and less so towards others. Some of the different factors that play a role in this tendency include:. Research has found that there are gender differences in the experience and expression of empathy, although these findings are somewhat mixed. Women score higher on empathy tests, and studies suggest that women tend to feel more cognitive empathy than men. At the most basic level, there appear to be two main factors that contribute to the ability to experience empathy: genetics and socialization.

Essentially, it boils down the age-old relative contributions of nature and nurture. Parents pass down genes that contribute to overall personality, including the propensity toward sympathy, empathy, and compassion. On the other hand, people are also socialized by their parents, peers, communities, and society. How people treat others as well as how they feel about others is often a reflection of the beliefs and values that were instilled at a very young age. A few reasons why people sometimes lack empathy include cognitive biases, dehumanization, and victim-blaming. Sometimes the way people perceive the world around them is influenced by a number of cognitive biases. For example, people often attribute other people's failures to internal characteristics, while blaming their own shortcomings on external factors.

These biases can make it difficult to see all the factors that contribute to a situation and make it less likely that people will be able to see a situation from the perspective of another. Many also fall victim to the trap of thinking that people who are different from them also don't feel and behave the same as they do. This is particularly common in cases when other people are physically distant. For example, when they watch reports of a disaster or conflict in a foreign land, people might be less likely to feel empathy if they think that those who are suffering are fundamentally different from themselves. Sometimes when another person has suffered a terrible experience, people make the mistake of blaming the victim for their circumstances.

This is the reason why victims of crimes are often asked what they might have done differently to prevent the crime. This tendency stems from the need to believe that the world is a fair and just place. People want to believe that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get—it fools them into thinking that such terrible things could never happen to them. The term empathy was first introduced in by psychologist Edward B. Several different theories have been proposed to explain empathy. Studies have shown that specific areas of the brain play a role in how empathy is experienced.

More recent approaches focus on the cognitive and neurological processes that lie behind empathy. Researchers have found that different regions of the brain play an important role in empathy, including the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula. Research suggests that there are important neurobiological components to the experience of empathy. Functional MRI research also indicates that an area of the brain known as the inferior frontal gyrus IFG plays a critical role in the experience of empathy.

Some of the earliest explorations into the topic of empathy centered on feeling what others feel allows people to have a variety of emotional experiences. The philosopher Adam Smith suggested that sympathy allows us to experience things that we might never otherwise be able to fully feel. This can involve feeling empathy for both real people and imaginary characters. Experiencing empathy for fictional characters, for example, allows people to have a range of emotional experiences that might otherwise be impossible. Sociologist Herbert Spencer proposed that sympathy served an adaptive function and aided in the survival of the species. Empathy leads to helping behavior, which benefits social relationships. Humans are naturally social creatures.

Things that aid in our relationships with other people benefit us as well. When people experience empathy, they are more likely to engage in prosocial behaviors that benefit other people. Things such as altruism and heroism are also connected to feeling empathy for others. Fortunately, empathy is a skill that you can learn and strengthen. If you would like to build your empathy skills, there are a few things that you can do:.