Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare
Creative empathy
At the Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare we’re exploring how creative empathy practices can be used to foster compassionate and person-centred care. We believe that the literary arts offer unique and powerful tools – for example shared reading, creative and expressive writing and group reflection – that can help clinicians and healthcare students to cultivate empathy, enhance wellbeing, and enrich their professional practice.
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What is creative empathy?
We’ve brought together practices from the literary arts and narrative medicine, such as shared and close reading of different types of literature, creative and expressive writing, storytelling and reflective practice, to form the basis of our creative empathy training for healthcare students and professionals. Our training is evidence-based and informed by research outputs from the team at the Centre for Empathic Healthcare. We aim to help healthcare professionals connect more deeply with themselves, their colleagues and the people they care for.
Through imaginative and creative practice, participants are invited to explore new perspectives, nurture self-awareness, and strengthen their ability to understand and respond to the emotional worlds of others.
Why creative practices matter in healthcare
Healthcare is a scientific and profoundly human endeavour. Creative practices based in the literary arts can:
- Foster empathy and emotional intelligence – reading and writing about diverse experiences opens up new ways of seeing and feeling.
- Support wellbeing and resilience – reflective and expressive writing can help manage stress, prevent burnout, and promote self-compassion.
- Enhance professional identity and development – engaging with narrative helps practitioners make meaning of their work, clarify values, and deepen vocational purpose.
- Strengthen reflective and academic skills – creative and reflective writing improves critical thinking and enriches scholarly and clinical writing.
- Improve team dynamics – shared creative practice fosters communication, collaboration, and trust, helping to reduce professional isolation.
It’s so interesting to see where your mind takes you. It really made me reflect on the stories patients tell us and how we need to pay attention to them, even if we don’t immediately understand the meaning.
It really has been inspiring and great to share with my colleagues.
A great range of activities; it really opened up conversations.
I’d really like to join more sessions that build on and help develop further the tools we’ve learnt about today.