Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare
Plenaries
Educating for Empathy
Hear more about our Plenaries as part of Educating for Empathy, including shared experiences from clinical experts and educators. Plenaries will cover a wide range of topics to explore how we approach empathy within healthcare, including mental health, injury, clinical leadership and the difference between good and great compassion.
Evidence-Based Approach
Educating for Empathy: An Evidence-Based Approach
Educating for Empathy: An Evidence-Based Approach outlines a rigorous yet practical framework for embedding empathy as a core professional competency in healthcare education. Drawing on the Empathy-Based Healthcare Education handbook, the talk challenges the assumption that empathy is either innate or best left to informal role-modelling. Instead, it presents empathy as a teachable, measurable, and evidence-based skill that is central to high-quality, person-centred, and evidence-based care.
The approach is grounded in six guiding principles: curricula should be evidence-based; informed by patients and students; extend beyond observable behaviours to professional identity (“being”); be evaluated through peer-reviewed research; actively engage faculty and learners; and meaningfully address diversity. These principles are operationalised through concrete educational strategies, including early and sustained patient contact, co-production with stakeholders, experiential learning (“walk a mile in patients’ shoes”), enhanced wellbeing education, and deliberate cultivation of an empathic hidden curriculum.
By integrating systematic reviews, local needs assessments, and robust evaluation, this model avoids both tokenistic empathy training and well-intentioned but sometimes ineffective interventions. The talk will be of interest to educators, curriculum leaders, and researchers seeking scalable, academically credible methods to foster empathy while supporting learner wellbeing and improving patient outcomes—using language and strategies that resonate across disciplines without sacrificing methodological rigour.
Teaching Empathy in Clinical settings
Teaching Empathy in Clinical Settings
Dr Andy Ward
This interactive plenary invites clinical educators to reflect on how empathic healthcare education can be meaningfully integrated into everyday clinical settings. Using evidence and real clinical examples, the lecture will explore what therapeutic empathy is, why it matters for patients and clinicians, and how it can be taught through supervision, feedback and role-modelling with medical students and postgraduate trainees.
The emphasis will be on making empathy visible, teachable and sustainable within normal clinical teaching and practice.
Unparalysed
Dr Diniesh Palipana
Unparalysed: How a spinal cord injury and depression shaped a doctor's thinking
Plato said, "The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul although the two cannot be separated. Yet, we have veered towards physically objectifying the patient experience, leaving the soul behind.
However, in an age where healthcare is in a crisis, where artificial intelligence is deemed more empathetic than a human, rethinking the way we deliver healthcare is critical.
Not only will this improve outcomes and reduce costs, but restore the honoured relationship between the doctor and patient. These are the lessons learned by a doctor who has been through a spinal cord injury and the depths of depression.