Teaching Doctors to Respond with Empathy: A Pilot Study

Empathy is a critical component of high-quality healthcare. When present in the clinical encounter, empathy is important to physicians (empathy is correlated with reductions in physician anxiety and burnout) and to patients (empathy is correlated with better medical decision making, enhanced trust, and improved treatment adherence). Unfortunately, there is an empathy gap in healthcare–physicians often miss opportunities to demonstrate empathy to their patients. This leaves patients feeling unheard, less likely to bring up details important to their care, and less likely to follow treatment guidelines from physicians, thus disrupting the physician-patient relationship. Luckily, communicating with empathy is a skill that can be taught and learned. With the right tools, learners can strengthen their empathic muscle and become better prepared for responding in difficult situations. The present thesis aims to validate a new tool for teaching empathy to medical trainees. This tool, an empathic communication guide, is drawn from social work as well as medical expertise. It is catered specifically to how medical trainees are accustomed to learning and provides the actual words to say in order to respond with empathy in difficult situations. A group of 8 palliative care fellows at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas received a copy of this guide and participated in an accompanying communication workshop. To gauge empathic responding ability, fellows completed pre- and post- surveys and patient simulations. These data were analyzed using a combination of novel and established methods for quantifying empathic behaviors. Fellows’ empathic communication skill significantly improved after exposure to the guide opening avenues for future study and application.