News and events

Taking place on the first Thursday of each month (except August and December).

Join us for a thought-provoking series of free one-hour lunchtime webinars exploring the power of empathy in healthcare. These interactive sessions will examine key topics such as breaking down barriers in inclusion healthcare, and enhancing empathy through creativity and compassionate communication. We’ll consider the value of involving patients as partners in health profession education, and discuss the cost-effectiveness of empathic healthcare, to demonstrate how empathy leads to better outcomes for patients and practitioners. Open to all healthcare professionals, educators, and students, these webinars offer a unique opportunity to deepen your understanding of empathic practice and its impact.

Find out more and book your place

Date: 20–22 April 2026

Join us for this three-day interactive course, designed for clinicians, educators, and academics who want to develop the skills to teach empathy effectively in their own settings.

Empathy benefits both patients and practitioners: become an expert in teaching this essential skill!

Find out more and book your place

Dates of event

• Half-day, online (MS Teams)
• 2026 date: 12 February 2026
• 2027 date: 11 February 2027

Systematic reviews have shown that empathy varies between healthcare practitioners, can be taught, and improves patient outcomes. Yet empathy often declines during clinical training. This interactive half-day webinar explores the what, why, and how of teaching empathy. Drawing on current evidence and practice from the Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare, participants will examine frameworks such as therapeutic empathy and the CARE Measure, and learn practical strategies to foster empathy in medical education. Participants will also work collaboratively to design a teaching intervention tailored to their clinical or educational context.

Find out more and book your place

Title of the article: Medical students’ perspectives on empathy: A systematic review and metasynthesis.
Date of publication: August 4 2020
Date of club meeting: October 28 2025

Why this paper? 

Empathy is foundational to high-quality healthcare, but research suggests it may decline during medical training. This qualitative meta-synthesis offers a rich student-centred exploration of how medical learners interpret, experience and negotiate empathy. In our most recent Journal Club session, Dr Amber Bennett-Weston aimed to uncover how the findings of this review might inform teaching, supervision and organisational culture in medical schools.

What did the authors do? 

The authors conducted a systematic review and meta-synthesis of qualitative research on medical students’ perspectives of empathy.

• Databases searched: Medline, PsycINFO, EMBASE, and SSCI. 
• Inclusion criteria: English-language qualitative studies in which “empathy” appeared in the results section, involving medical students or physicians reflecting on their training.
• Quality appraisal: Conducted using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) tool.
• Analysis approach: Thematic synthesis informed by meta-ethnography, with three researchers analysing studies independently and then meeting to identify shared themes.

What did the authors find?

The review identified four key themes capturing how medical students experience empathy during their training:

1. Defining empathy: Students struggled to agree on what empathy means. Some described perspective-taking or compassion, others saw it as simply “being human.”
2. Teaching empathy: Opinions were split on whether empathy can be taught. Formal courses helped some reflect, but most felt real learning came through patient encounters, workplace culture, and observing empathic role models.
3. Willingness to be empathetic: Many students valued empathy but worried about emotional overload or losing professional distance. Others felt their training prioritised biomedical knowledge over human connection.
4. Evolution during medical school: Most students perceived a decline in empathy, blaming stress, workload, and a competitive culture that encourages detachment.

Authors’ conclusions: Empathy may be too complex to teach directly. Instead, educators should focus on specific skills—like listening and reflection—and strengthen apprenticeship models where empathy is learned through example and culture.

Our critical appraisal

Our journal club praised the ambition of this review but noted that several methodological and conceptual issues limit its overall rigour.

Background and rationale: The justification for focusing on qualitative research is sound but rather broad. The stated aim – “to generate new insights into the teaching of empathy” – lacked precision, making it difficult to ascertain what specific question the authors intended to answer.

Methods: The authors followed recognised qualitative synthesis methods, but there was limited transparency:

• No preregistered protocol and English-only inclusion restrict reproducibility and global scope.
• No table of excluded studies with reasons for exclusion.
• The absence of a definition of “empathy” makes it hard to know whether all of the included studies were considering the same concept.
• Quality appraisal results were summarised collectively rather than by study.

Results: The breadth of coverage (35 studies, 18 countries) is impressive, yet the four reported “themes” are more descriptive than interpretive. 

Discussion and conclusions: The recommendations to focus on listening and role-modelling are pragmatic, but the claim that empathy is “too complex to teach” feels overstated. The paper adds limited new theoretical insight beyond previous reviews.

Overall quality: On the AMSTAR-2 tool, this review would be rated critically low, due to several methodological weaknesses (no protocol, no table of excluded studies with reasons for exclusion, unclear quality weighting, lack of certainty assessment). Nonetheless, it succeeds in highlighting the persistent confusion around empathy and the cultural pressures that shape students’ experiences.

Take home reflections

• Empathy remains conceptually contested and inconsistently prioritised in medical education.
• Role-modelling and teaching students to clear objectives (particularly around active listening) emerge as practical strategies for cultivating empathy.
• Future research should define empathy explicitly and consider exploring students’ perceptions of empathy across healthcare professions.
  
  

Title of the article: A new framework for developing and evaluating complex interventions: update of Medical Research Council guidance
Date of publication: 9 August 2021
Date of club meeting: 26 August 2025

Yesterday's Empathy Centre journal club explored how the Medical Research Council's updated framework for developing and evaluating complex interventions applies to empathy research in healthcare settings. Jeremy Howick's presentation highlighted both the potential and challenges of treating empathy as a "complex intervention" requiring rigorous evaluation.

Why empathy needs different evaluation methods

The 2021 MRC framework represents a significant evolution from traditional clinical trial approaches. Unlike simple drug interventions, empathy involves multiple components: communication skills training, behavioral change techniques, contextual factors, and stakeholder engagement across different healthcare settings. The framework's four-phase structure—development, feasibility assessment, evaluation, and implementation—provides a roadmap for researchers tackling these multifaceted interventions.

Learning from smoking cessation research

The presentation used smoking cessation support for people with severe mental health problems as a paradigmatic example. This case study demonstrated the framework's emphasis on early stakeholder engagement, combining systematic reviews with primary research involving patients and healthcare professionals. The researchers identified key barriers (nicotine dependence, smoking as self-medication) and facilitators (health concerns, cost concerns) through focus groups before designing their intervention.

Practical applications for empathy research

The framework's core elements—considering context, developing program theory, engaging stakeholders, identifying uncertainties, refining interventions, and evaluating economic consequences—directly apply to empathy interventions in medical schools and clinical settings. Rather than assuming empathy training works universally, researchers must now consider how interventions interact with specific contexts and what mechanisms drive effectiveness.

Critical perspective

While Howick praised the framework overall, he offered constructive criticism about its unnecessarily complex presentation. His simplified summary—"find an intervention, understand what stakeholders think, then evaluate it properly"—captures the essence more accessibly than the formal guidance documents. Also, the way it was developed risks being accused of having used what Trish Greenhalgh labelled the “GOBSAT” (good old boys sat around a table) method.

The framework represents progress in intervention science, moving beyond simple "does it work?" questions to examine how, why, when, and for whom complex interventions succeed. For empathy research, this means more rigorous development processes and better evidence for real-world implementation—ultimately improving patient care through scientifically grounded compassionate practice.