Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare
Importance of empathy in healthcare
Empathy supports doctors to see the situation from their patient’s perspective and can be beneficial to both patients and practitioners.
Evidence from high-quality research shows that a more empathic approach to healthcare can nurture greater trust between patients and practitioners, calm anxiety, improve patient outcomes ranging from reduced pain and post-operative morphine use to improved patient satisfaction and quality of life. For the NHS workforce, practicing empathically can contribute to greater resilience to the pressures of fast-paced healthcare systems, support practitioner well-being and enhance performance.
However, adopting a more patient-centred, holistic approach to patient care does not solely rely on the practitioner’s skills. For healthcare to be more empathic in an increasingly digital future, the environment that practitioners work in also needs to be made conducive for empathy to thrive.
In partnership with our national and international collaborators, our research and teaching will catalyse the conditions for more empathetic interactions between healthcare professionals, healthcare systems and patients both nationally and internationally.
“I’m from a single-parent family and spent my childhood as a carer for my mother, who was diagnosed with an emotionally unstable personality disorder. There were often doctors and nurses involved in my mum’s care, and I saw some great examples of how fantastic the health service can be when they took time to empathise and build rapport with my mum. But, more often than not, the care we received was not good and totally lacked empathy. I saw the devastating impact this had on my mum’s ability to trust her team, how distressed she got when her problems were trivialised and how insignificant she was made to feel by the doctors who were supposedly caring for her.
Interactions with doctors became traumatic and if she wasn’t made to feel like a person rather than a problem early on, she would just stop engaging, she wouldn’t adhere to her treatments and she got more unwell. I’ve seen first-hand that empathy is important in medicine, but it wasn’t until I was a Foundation Year medical student that I really started to appreciate how much of an integral part of our training it needs to be. It is part of my duty of care as a doctor, my professional development, and a core skill that I hope will always form the basis of my future consultations, so that I can provide the best possible care for my patients.”