Helen Riess & Edwin Rutsch: 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

 

Links Massachusetts General Hospital - Department of Psychiatry - Bio Empathy and Relational Science Program Staff Bio Emotional Intelligence Consortium - Bio Empathetics.com

 

 

The Baby in the Well, the case against empathy' Response by Helen Riess & Edwin Rutsch
(2013-05-20 - The Baby in the Well,  The case against empathy. New Yorker Magazine)

 

 

 

 

 

2013-05-01 - Boston Stronger -- Empathy in Action

"The human brain is hard-wired for empathy; in situations like this, we understand why. Helping those who suffer diminishes both their pain, and ours, preserving our fellow humans, ourselves and our species.

It was an odd feeling -- walking into Massachusetts General Hospital just days after the Boston Marathon bombings had uprooted our hospital and challenged our staff to the core of their training and their emotional strength. But our lives, however altered, had to continue. In my case, I was to lead an inter-hospital seminar with medical, surgical and psychiatry interns at an annual offsite retreat -- bright young men and women preparing for promising futures in medicine, and our workshop happened to focus on empathy, an essential component of not just the medical profession, but also our collective humanity.

As is customary in my workshop, I asked the interns to tell each other a minute-long story of some emotional significance. The task is meant to elicit empathy from our peers, to demonstrate how we convey caring through nonverbal signals, and to remind these burgeoning physicians how vital compassion is to our profession and our interactions with patients, especially considering the fact that research shows a marked decline in empathy that beings in the third-year of medical school."
 

2013-02-01 - Medscape Today: Can Empathy Be Taught?
(requires registration on Medscape)

"The research team that I lead set out to determine whether specific training in empathy could improve patients' perceptions of their physicians' care in a randomized controlled trial. I started by creating a series of 3 training modules grounded in the recent literature on the neurobiology and physiology of empathy and emotions.

Research has shown that empathic observers have neural activity and autonomic arousal -- as measured by heart rate and skin conductance -- mirroring that of a person experiencing pain or distress firsthand. Nearly everyone has had the experience of flinching when observing another person in pain, such as when someone's hand is slammed in a car door."

Study:  Empathy Training for Resident Physicians: A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Neuroscience-Informed Curriculum pdf
Helen Riess, John M. Kelley, Robert W. Bailey, Emily J. Dunn and Margot Phillips

Physician empathy is an essential attribute of the patient–physician relationship and is associated with better outcomes, greater patient safety and fewer malpractice claims.

Objective: We tested whether an innovative empathy training protocol grounded in neuroscience could improve physician empathy as rated by patients.

Conclusion: 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.

Multiple articles were written based on the study.

June 21, 2012 - Can Doctors Learn Empathy?
Blogs.nytimes.com
Empathy has always been considered an essential component of compassionate care, and recent research has shown that its benefits go far beyond the exam room. Greater physician empathy has been associated with fewer medical errors, better patient outcomes and more satisfied patients. It also results in fewer malpractice claims and happier doctors.

June 07, 201 A Steady Dose of Empathy
Hospitals and Health Networks Daily
Healthcare organizations are well aware that patient satisfaction is an important and growing component of the formula used by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to calculate reimbursements. Private payers have already begun employing pay-for-performance contracts that include a patient satisfaction component.

June 1, 2012 - Helping doctors put empathy to good use
Boston.com
Dr. Helen Ries, director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, and associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, recently published a study showing that explicitly teaching empathy to doctorsin- training improves their interactions with patients.

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Empathy has four components – 1. cognitive, 2, affective, 3 behavioral and 4. moral.
Empathy can be used for both positive and negative goals.
Empathy is more than just a feeling, it is also behaving the right way even when you don’t have an empathic feeling.

 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. With attention to emotional signals of others we become more empathic.  People must learn to distinguish true empathy from misguided empathy. This is essential for our society, where misguided empathy leads to misguided advice and actually harms others.