Center for Building a Culture of Empathy

   Home    Conference   Magazine   Empathy Tent   Services    Newsletter   Facebook    Youtube   Contact   Search

Join the International Conference on: How Might We Build a Culture of Empathy and Compassion?


Empathic Design
Empathy Circles

  Restorative Empathy Circles
Empathy Tent
Training
Conference
Magazine

Expert Interviews
Obama on Empathy

References

    Books
    Conferences
    Definitions
    Experts
(100+)
    History
    Organizations
    Quotations
    Empathy Tests

 

Conference  -  Panels  -  Possible Panels  -  Facebook Event  -  Education  -  Volunteer - [Planning]

International Online Conference on:
How Might We Build a Culture of Empathy and Compassion?
Permanently Ongoing

Sub Conference:  Empathy in Health Care

How can we transform health care system to be more empathic and compassionate?
http://j.mp/N98AoS

 

Empathy & HealthCare Magazine
The latest News about Empathy and Heath Care from around the World. 
 
 
 

The Empathy Effect 

Helen Riess

Helen Riess, M.D. is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School and Director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program at Massachusetts General Hospital.  The mission of the Program is to enhance empathy and interpersonal relationships in healthcare. She is also Chief Technology Officer of Empathetics which offers scientifically based empathy training proven to optimize interpersonal engagement.

 

Helen is author of The Empathy Effect: Seven Neuroscience-Based Keys for Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Work, and Connect Across Differences
 

In this book, I hope to demonstrate how showing greater empathy toward your fellow human beings can enhance your own life and society as a whole. Through empathy, parents see their children for who they are, and help them realize their potential. Teachers connect with students in ways that help learners discover and expand there talents. Businesses are more likely to thrive because they invest in the people working for them. Politicians start to represent the needs of their constituencies.

 

The arts have always been a connector for people of all walks of life to learn more about one another, find common ground, inspire curiosity rather than judgment, and provide shared mind empathic experiences that remind us that all people are part of the fabric of humanity.

 

Sub Conference: Health Care

The Empathy Initiative
 to change lives and improve the quality of care
Tracy Levett-Jones

Tracy Levett-Jones is the Professor of Nursing Education and Discipline Lead at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Her research interests include: empathy, belongingness, clinical reasoning, interprofessional education, cultural competence, simulation and patient safety. Tracy has authored ten books, the most recent being 'Clinical Reasoning: Learning to think like a nurse' and 'Critical Conversations for Patient Safety'; as well as nearly 200 book chapters, reports and peer reviewed journal articles.
 

 The Empathy Initiative is a group of like-minded academics and practitioners with a strong belief in the power and potential of empathy to change lives and improve the quality of care provided to patients/clients/residents.

 

Our group shares a commitment to undertaking collaborative empathy research that has the capacity to transform education and practice. The purpose of the Empathy Initiative is to generate high quality, rigorous empathy/compassion research that informs and influences student learning and patient care, either directly or indirectly.

Sub Conference: Health Care

Why a Culture of Empathy is Essential

Brain Goldman

 

For more than thirty years, Dr. Brian Goldman has been an active participant in and keen observer of the culture of modern medicine. Since 2007, he has hosted White Coat, Black Art, a multi-award-winning show on CBC Radio that reveals what goes on behind a hospital's sliding doors. Goldman is author of: The Power of Kindness: Why Empathy Is Essential in Everyday Life.

 

As a veteran emergency room physician, Dr. Brian Goldman has a successful career setting broken bones, curing pneumonia, and otherwise pulling people back from the brink of medical emergency. He always believed that caring came naturally to physicians. But time, stress, errors, and heavy expectations left him wondering if he might not be the same caring doctor he thought he was at the beginning of his career. He wondered what kindness truly looks like - in himself and in others.

 
How can empathy transform health care?
Empathy is the way that we establish human connections. Without it, relationships between people are just transactions and devoid of the emotional warmth and meaning that I think is inherent in the human condition. If we could put more empathy into health care, it would mean that patients are more likely to follow the instructions of physicians and to feel assured that the best is being done for them.

 

Sub Conference: Health Care

Compassionate Connection

The Healing Power of Empathy and Mindful Listening
David Rakel

David Rakel, MD was the founder and director of the University of Wisconsin Integrative Medicine program and is now Professor and Chair of the Department of Family & Community Medicine at the University of New Mexico Medical School in Albuquerque, NM.


The Doctor by Luke Fildes (Wikipedia)

 "I knew that creating connections is what helps me facilitate healing and also helps me to feel healthy."


Sub Conference: Health Care

Empathy Training in Healthcare and Beyond
Elizabeth Morrison


"An accomplished trainer, therapist and consultant, Elizabeth Morrison specializes in helping health care organizations enhance human connections in care provision. Her areas of expertise and passion are building effective and sustainable integrated behavioral health (IBH) services, developing patient-centered complex care programs, and providing research-based training in empathetic communication for healthcare professionals. Originally inspired by Carl Rogers'research on the primary role of empathy in healing, she uses evidence-based strategies to design trainings and consultations tailored to meet the needs of a wide range of organizations." Elizabeth developed the Empathy Effect Training and curriculum for teaching empathy skills in the healthcare field with the  Institute for Healthcare Communication."
 

"Expressions of empathy are the "secret sauce" that ensure caregiving encounters are healing and not harmful. They are essential for building connection and trust, and especially so for interactions with people who have suffered trauma. Empathy is universally accessible, free, an effective treatment by itself in many situations - and it has no side effects!" Empathy Effect


Sub Conference: Health Care

Developing an Empathic Way of Being
in Healthcare

Jeremy Howick

Jeremy Howick is senior researcher at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Services at University of Oxford.  His research lies at the crossroads of philosophy and medicine. His interest in empathetic care grew out of his interest in placebo effects.  Jeremy is also founder and director of the The Oxford Empathetic Care Program.

 

The Oxford Empathetic Care Programme (OxCare) is an interdisciplinary research group that includes medical practitioners, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists.

Aims:  Promote the importance of empathy in clinical practice. This includes empathetic relationships between patients (and their families) and healthcare practitioners, as well as empathetic relationships between healthcare systems and patients/practitioners.
 

Objectives

1. To develop and maintain a glossary of empathy (and related terms) definitions
2. To maintain a database of key measures of empathy
3. To identify and reduce contextual obstacles to empathy
4. Explore the relationship between evidence-based healthcare and empathetic healthcare
5. To develop empathy training for healthcare practitioners and healthcare managers
6. To develop a research program
7. To identify obstacles and facilitators to empathy
8. Explore the relevance of empathy to professional burnout and stress
9. To investigate whether the current model of revalidation is empathetic
10. To investigate how can empathetic care improve value-based healthcare

Sub Conference: Health Care

Beyond Compassion Fatigue:
The Transactional Model of Physician Compassion

Antonio Fernando and Edwin Rutsch

Antonio (Tony) Fernando is a medical doctor and Senior Lecturer at the School of Medicine in the University of Auckland located in Auckland, New Zealand. His research interests include diagnosis and treatment of insomnia and other sleep disorders. He is currently working on a PhD on compassion in healthcare.

 

Tony wrote an article titled;  Beyond Compassion Fatigue: The Transactional Model of Physician Compassion.  He writes, "Paradoxically, despite being central to the practice of good medicine, the bulk of studies across the past two decades have been focused not on compassion, but on compassion fatigue....

 

"We have suggested that the scientific study of compassion in medicine may be enhanced when conducted within a transactional framework in which compassion is viewed as stemming from the dynamic interactions between physician, patient, clinical, and institution/environment factors. The Transactional Model of Physician Compassion offers a framework within which to identify and organize the barriers and facilitators of physician compassion and thus better inform future interventions aimed at enhancing physician compassion."
Sub Conference: Health Care

 Danielle Ofri and Edwin Rutsch: How to Transform Medicine with Empathy and Stories

Danielle Ofri, MD is an essayist, editor, and practicing internist in New York City. She is an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital, and Associate Professor of Medicine at New York University School of Medicine. Danielle is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Bellevue Literary Review,

 the first literary journal to arise from a medical setting. Danielle's newest book - What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine – explores the hidden emotional world of the doctor, and how this impacts the medical care that patients receive every day.

 

She writes, "It’s no wonder that the third year of medical school figures prominently in studies that document decline of empathy and moral reasoning in medical trainees... the erosion of empathy, for example, may have long-reaching consequences. Patients of doctors who score lower on tests that measure empathy appear to have worse clinical outcomes. Diabetic patients, for instance, have worse control of their blood sugar and cholesterol. Cancer patients seem to experience more depression. Medication compliance diminishes. Even the common cold can last longer."
Sub Conference: Health Care and Arts

 
Panel 24: Moving Medical Culture from Detachment to Empathy, Jodi Halpern, Helen Riess, Edwin Rutsch  
  Edwin Rutsch, Director of the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy, hosts a discussion with two of the primary leaders in the movement to transform medical culture from detachment to a culture of empathy.  

Jodi Halpern M.D., Ph.D, is Associate Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Joint Medical Program and the School of Public Health.  She is author of From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice.

Helen Riess M.D., Ph.D is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School and Director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program at Massachusetts General Hospital.  She is Chief Technology Officer of Empathetics which offers scientifically based empathy training proven to optimize interpersonal engagement.
Sub Conference: Health Care

Raúl de Velasco M.D. and Edwin Rutsch: How to Build a Culture of Empathy In Medicine




Raúl de Velasco is director of Clinical Ethics at the University of Miami Bioethics Program and Chair of the Baptist Health Bioethics Committee.  He says. "I am a physician who practiced Nephrology for over 30 years and had a very large practice. My full training in medicine was at the University of Miami. Most of my patients were on dialysis and needed kidney transplants, they had a lot of problems, you learn how to detach from their suffering but as I did that almost as a survival mechanism the practice of medicine became less enjoyable more about numbers than of people."

 

Raúl saw the importance of empathy for doctors and has been working to promote empathy in the medical field.  He is also looking at developing a mutual empathic relationship between doctors and patients.  We did two interviews about his studies and work on empathy. In the second interview, Raúl walked thought his Clinical Empathy Slide Show Presentation. The presentation discusses;

1. Psychology of Empathy
2. Objectification and the ‘wiring’
3. Caring in Medicine
4. The Practice of Empathy
5. Problems with Empathy

Sub Conference: Health Care

Robin Youngson: How to Build a Culture of Empathy in Healthcare

Robin Youngson M.D., is an anesthesiologist in New Zealand. He is an International leader in the compassionate healthcare movement and founded HEARTS in HEALTHCARE which is an inspirational community of health professionals, students, patient advocates, health leaders, and many others who are champions for compassionate care. "We believe bringing like-minded people together is the first step to re-humanizing healthcare around the world".
Robin is author of TIME TO CARE: How to love your patients and your job. He says, "my passion is to restore the heart of healthcare and to make caring and compassion the daily lived experience and practice of all in healthcare. Health professionals need compassion and caring in the workplace as much as patients - the rates of burnout, emotional exhaustion and hopelessness are far too high."
Sub Conference: Health Care

Jodi Halpern: Dialogs on How to Build a Culture of Empathy in Healthcare

Jodi Halpern. M.D., Ph.D, is Associate Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Joint Medical Program and the School of Public Health. As a psychiatrist with a background in philosophy, she investigates how emotions and the imagination shape healthcare decisions of clinicians and patients. She is author of From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice.

Clinical Empathy: "As a psychiatrist as well as a faculty member in bioethics at UC Berkeley for almost two decades, I’ve investigated what happens to patients when their doctors show a lack of empathy. Doctors were trained to believe that emotional detachment from patients is personally and professionally necessary, but experience shows that patients don’t trust doctors who are aloof or superficially friendly. Yet, only recently have studies proven just how harmful detachment and how beneficial empathy is for healing...."
Sub Conference: Health Care  and Science

Helen Riess: How to Build a Culture of Empathy in Health Care

Helen Riess, M.D. is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry,
Harvard Medical School and Director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program at Massachusetts General Hospital
.
 

The mission of the Program is to enhance empathy and interpersonal relationships in healthcare. She is also Chief Technology Officer of Empathetics which offers scientifically based empathy training proven to optimize interpersonal engagement.

 Helen is a coauthor of the study, Empathy Training for Resident Physicians. The study concluded;  "A brief intervention grounded in the neurobiology of empathy significantly improved the physician empathy as rated by patients, suggesting that the quality of care in medicine could be improved by integrating the neuroscience of empathy into the medical education."

Empathy is like, getting underneath the skin of another person, to merge temporarily with their experience, then getting out, to reflect on the experience.  Empathy can be taught, although a certain endowment may be inborn, research shows that it is a mutable trait. Our study demonstrated that empathy could be increased significantly in the training group and it decreased significantly in the control group.
Sub Conference: Health Care

Melanie Sears: How to Build a Culture of Empathy

Melanie Sears has been a trainer for the Center of Nonviolent Communications since 1991. She works with businesses, hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, individuals, couples and parents in transforming their usual way of operations, interpersonal interactions and dealing with conflict to one which is more compassionate, conscious and effective.

 Melanie presents Nonviolent Communication at conventions, at universities, and at churches.  She has been interviewed on the radio and on TV and is the author of several books including: Humanizing Health Care with Nonviolent Communication.
Sub Conference: NVC and Health Care

 Empathic Listening Demonstration: Melanie Sears Offers Edwin Rutsch Empathy for an Inner Conflict

Melanie Sears is a trainer in Compassionate Communication. She is author of several books including: Choose Your Words: Harnessing the Power of Compassionate Communication to Heal and Connect.  In this second interview with Edwin Rutsch, Melanie offers empathic listening to Edwin for a problematic past experience he had.
Sub Conference: NVC
and Health Care

Dorrie Fontaine: How to Build a Culture of Empathy in Healthcare

Dorrie Fontaine, is Dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Virginia. At the school she started the Compassionate Care & Empathic Leadership Initiative (CCELI) "which exists to create dialogue around and preparedness for nurses who deal every day with people in life-changing situations–one-time or chronic illness, terminal disease, end-of-life care and even death itself–and all the highly-charged, complex issues surrounding them.

 The CCELI focuses on systems that optimize patients’ and their family’s quality of life, incorporate compassion and empathy into personal behavior, interprofessional interactions and encounters with patients and families.  We’re developing clinical, educational and research initiatives that further those aims. Our ultimate vision is to reduce human suffering and promote health and well-being by fostering compassionate people and systems."

 

"Can compassion be taught? UVa Nursing's all volunteer army of nurses, physicians, administrators, professors and students are learning concrete ways to insert compassion into every patient interaction -- and they're bolstering their own resilience in the process."

Sub Conferences: Health Care

 
 
Panel 20:  Empathy in Critical Care - Empathy and Healthcare Conference
Keonnis R. Taylor
Jodi Halpern
Barbara Beach
Marilyn Ababio
Edwin Rutsch
This panel with experts in the field of healthcare explored the role of empathy and compassion in providing medical care.

 

The panel included;

A few of the questions addressed were;

  •  How do those providing objective medical care, especially around the grim subject of one's own death, provide compassionate care without absorbing the emotions surrounding imminent death?
  • Please describe your work and why the principle of empathy is relevant to it?
  •  The theory of Counter-Transference in Psychology postulates that the practitioner's feelings are entangled with the patient's. Does this also happen in the medical field? etc.
    Sub Conference: Health Care

Richard Levin: How to Build a Culture of Empathy in Healthcare

Richard Levin is an internationally recognized physician scientist, scholar, cardiologist and educator. He is also the President and CEO of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation. The Gold Foundation is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to fostering humanism in medicine.  "It encourages the development of physicians who combine the high tech skills of cutting-edge medical science with the high touch skills of communication, empathy and compassion."

The organization says that, "As the nature of doctor-patient relationship changes, compassion and empathy are essential." The Foundation fosters the development of empathy in healthcare thought a variety of ways and initiatives, such as,  lectures, conferences, physician networking, grants, fostering scientific research, award ceremonies, a website, etc.
Sub Conference: Health Care

Helen Riess: How to Build a Culture of Empathy in Health Care

Helen Riess, M.D. is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry,
Harvard Medical School and Director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program at Massachusetts General Hospital
.
 

The mission of the Program is to enhance empathy and interpersonal relationships in healthcare. She is also Chief Technology Officer of Empathetics which offers scientifically based empathy training proven to optimize interpersonal engagement.

 Helen is a coauthor of the study, Empathy Training for Resident Physicians. The study concluded;  "A brief intervention grounded in the neurobiology of empathy significantly improved the physician empathy as rated by patients, suggesting that the quality of care in medicine could be improved by integrating the neuroscience of empathy into the medical education."

Empathy is like, getting underneath the skin of another person, to merge temporarily with their experience, then getting out, to reflect on the experience.  Empathy can be taught, although a certain endowment may be inborn, research shows that it is a mutable trait. Our study demonstrated that empathy could be increased significantly in the training group and it decreased significantly in the control group.
Sub Conference: Health Care

 
 

James Doty: Dialogs on How to Build a Culture of Empathy & Compassion

James Doty M.D., is Stanford Clinical Professor of Neurosurgery and founding director of the Center for the Study of Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE.  'CCARE is striving to create a community of scholars and researchers, including neuroscientists, psychologists, educators and philosophical and contemplative thinkers around the study of compassion.' 

He says we have to go beyond mindfulness to a transcendent connection between people. We can get beyond loneliness,  isolation and depression to have a more sustained happiness, by contributing to the wellbeing of others.
Sub Conference: Science

Issidoros Sarinopoulos: How to Build a Culture of Empathy Without Pain

Issidoros Sarinopoulos (Sid) is Assistant Professor of Psychology at
Michigan State University where he is director of the Lab for Social and Affective Neuroscience. Sid's research interests include the psychological and neural underpinnings of emotion, judgment, decision making, and social behavior.

His work integrates the theories and methods of affective and social neuroscience on the one hand, and more traditional disciplines in the social sciences on the other.

Sid was part of a study looking at how an empathic doctor-patient relationship reduces patients pain.  Listen up, doc: Empathy raises patients’ pain tolerance "A doctor-patient relationship built on trust and empathy doesn’t just put patients at ease – it actually changes the brain’s response to stress and increases pain tolerance, according to new findings from a Michigan State University research team."
Sub Conferences: Health Care and Science

Louise Grant: How to Build a Culture of Empathy in Social Work

Louise Grant is Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Bedfordshire. Louise has been studying the role of empathy in fostering resilience in social workers in the UK.


She says, "My teaching interests are in children and families social work and in particular in developing reflective practice for effective social work and developing supervision knowledge and skills in social workers. My research focus is on reflective practice and developing emotional resilience for social work practice"

Louise is co-author of the study, 'Exploring Stress Resilience in Trainee Social Workers: The Role of Emotional and Social Competencies'. In order to inform the development of interventions to enhance the work-related well-being of early career social workers, this study examined several emotional and social competencies (i.e. emotional intelligence, reflective ability, empathy and social competence) as predictors of resilience in 240 trainees.

Sub Conferences: Health Care and Science


Overview and Introduction and more videos

 
We had a wonderful meeting at the first Empathy Healthcare Café on June 25th, 2009. We received so many comments like, "great Café", "what's next?" and "how can we keep this going?"  Thank you to everyone that contributed time, energy, ideas, stories, video, supplies, resources, etc. to hosting the Café. Below is the video of the Café.

From Joan. "Thank you for attending and creating a special evening. As many of you mentioned to me the energy and ideas in the room were truly inspiring! The list that is attached is a compilation of the ideas everyone contributed during the action item session. There were many comments, in your reflections and after the close of the Café about “let’s keep going.” If you would like to get together to put your ideas into the next phase just respond to this email, and then we can pick a time, and place to work on an Empathy Grass Roots Movement."   Joan Kuenz


Empathy Art Cafe Outline