Empathy In Health Professions Education And Patient Care

In this thorough revision, updating, and expansion of his great 2007 book, Empathy in Patient Care, Professor Hojat offers all of us in healthcare education an uplifting magnum opus that is sure to greatly enhance how we conceptualize, measure, and teach the central professional virtue of empathy. Hojat’s new Empathy in Health Professions Education and Patient Care provides students and professionals across healthcare with the most scientifically rigorous, conceptually vivid, and comprehensive statement ever produced proving once and for all what we all know intuitively – empathy is healing both for those who receive it and for those who give it. This book is filled with great science, great philosophizing, and great ‘how to’ approaches to education. Every student and practitioner in healthcare today should read this and keep it by the bedside in a permanent place of honor. Stephen G Post, Ph.D., Professor of Preventive Medicine, and Founding Director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics, School of Medicine, Stony Brook University Dr. Hojat has provided, in this new edition, a definitive resource for the evolving area of empathy research and education. For those engaged in medical student or resident education and especially for those dedicated to efforts to improve the patient experience, this book is a treasure trove of primary work in the field of empathy. Leonard H. Calabrese, D.O., Professor of Medicine, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University The latest edition of Empathy in Health Professions Education and Patient Care grounds the clinical art of empathic caring in the newly recognized contributions of brain imagery and social cognitive neuroscience. Furthermore, it updates the accumulating empirical evidence for the clinical effects of empathy that has been facilitated by the widespread use of the Jefferson Scale of Empathy, a generative contribution to clinical research by this book’s author. In addition, the book is so coherently structured that each chapter contributes to an overall understanding of empathy, while also covering its subject so well that it could stand alone. This makes Empathy in Health Professions Education and Patient Care an excellent choice for clinicians, students, educators and researchers. Herbert Adler, M.D., Ph.D. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior,Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University It is my firm belief that empathy as defined and assessed by Dr. Hojat in his seminal book has far reaching implications for other areas of human interaction including business, management, government, economics, and international relations. Amir H. Mehryar, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Behavioral Sciences and Population Studies, Institute for Research and Training in Management and Planning, Tehran, Iran

Human beings, regardless of age, sex, or state of health, are designed by evolution to form meaningful interpersonal relationships through verbal and nonverbal communication. The theme that empathic human connections are beneficial to the body and mind underlies all 12 chapters of this book, in which empathy is viewed from a multidisciplinary perspective that includes evolutionary biology; neuropsychology; clinical, social, developmental, and educational psychology; and health care delivery and education.

Empathy is essential to effectively engaging patients as partners in care. Clinicians’ empathy is increasingly understood as a professional competency, a mode and process of relating that can be learned and taught. Communication and empathy training are penetrating healthcare professions curricula as knowledge about the most effective modalities to train, maintain, and deepen empathy grows. This book draws on a wide range of contributors across many disciplines, and takes an evidence-based and longitudinal approach to clinical empathy education. It takes the reader on an engaging journey from understanding what empathy is (and how it can be measured), to approaches to empathy education informed by those understandings. It elaborates the benefits of embedding empathy training in graduate and post-graduate curricula and the importance of teaching empathy in accord with the clinician’s stage of professional development. Finally, it examines systemic perspectives on empathy and empathy education in the clinical setting, addressing issues such as equity, stigma, and law. Each section is full of the latest evidence-based research, including, notably, the advances that have been made over recent decades in the neurobiology of empathy. Perspectives among the interdisciplinary chapters include: Neurobiology of empathy Measuring empathy in healthcare Teaching clinicians about affect Teaching cultural humility: Understanding the core of others by reflecting on ours Empathy and implicit bias: Can empathy training improve equity? Teaching Empathy in Healthcare: Building a New Core Competency takes an innovative and comprehensive approach towards a developed understanding of empathy in the clinical context. This evidence-based book is set to become a classic text on the topic of empathy in healthcare settings, and will appeal to a broad readership of clinicians, educators, and researchers in clinical medicine, neuroscience, behavioral health, and the social sciences, leaders in educational and professional organizations, and anyone interested in the healthcare services they utilize.

The Institute of Medicine study Crossing the Quality Chasm (2001) recommended that an interdisciplinary summit be held to further reform of health professions education in order to enhance quality and patient safety. Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality is the follow up to that summit, held in June 2002, where 150 participants across disciplines and occupations developed ideas about how to integrate a core set of competencies into health professions education. These core competencies include patient-centered care, interdisciplinary teams, evidence-based practice, quality improvement, and informatics. This book recommends a mix of approaches to health education improvement, including those related to oversight processes, the training environment, research, public reporting, and leadership. Educators, administrators, and health professionals can use this book to help achieve an approach to education that better prepares clinicians to meet both the needs of patients and the requirements of a changing health care system.

Physicians recognize the importance of patients' emotions in healing yet believe their own emotional responses represent lapses in objectivity. Patients complain that physicians are too detached. Halpern argues that by empathizing with patients, rather than detaching, physicians can best help them. Yet there is no consistent view of what, precisely, clinical empathy involves. This book challenges the traditional assumption that empathy is either purely intellectual or an expression of sympathy. Sympathy, according to many physicians, involves over-identifying with patients, threatening objectivity and respect for patient autonomy. How can doctors use empathy in diagnosing and treating patients rithout jeopardizing objectivity or projecting their values onto patients? Jodi Halpern, a psychiatrist, medical ethicist and philosopher, develops a groundbreaking account of emotional reasoning as the core of clinical empathy. She argues that empathy cannot be based on detached reasoning because it involves emotional skills, including associating with another person's images and spontaneously following another's mood shifts. Yet she argues that these emotional links need not lead to over-identifying with patients or other lapses in rationality but rather can inform medical judgement in ways that detached reasoning cannot. For reflective physicians and discerning patients, this book provides a road map for cultivating empathy in medical practice. For a more general audience, it addresses a basic human question: how can one person's emotions lead to an understanding of how another person is feeling?

Recent work on empathy theory, research, and applications, by scholars from disciplines ranging from neuroscience to psychoanalysis. There are many reasons for scholars to investigate empathy. Empathy plays a crucial role in human social interaction at all stages of life; it is thought to help motivate positive social behavior, inhibit aggression, and provide the affective and motivational bases for moral development; it is a necessary component of psychotherapy and patient-physician interactions. This volume covers a wide range of topics in empathy theory, research, and applications, helping to integrate perspectives as varied as anthropology and neuroscience. The contributors discuss the evolution of empathy within the mammalian brain and the development of empathy in infants and children; the relationships among empathy, social behavior, compassion, and altruism; the neural underpinnings of empathy; cognitive versus emotional empathy in clinical practice; and the cost of empathy. Taken together, the contributions significantly broaden the interdisciplinary scope of empathy studies, reporting on current knowledge of the evolutionary, social, developmental, cognitive, and neurobiological aspects of empathy and linking this capacity to human communication, including in clinical practice and medical education.

This book compiles state-of-the art and science of health professions education into an international resource showcasing expertise in many and varied topics. It aligns profession-specific contributions with inter-professional offerings, and prompts readers to think deeply about their educational practices. The book explores the contemporary context of health professions education, its philosophical and theoretical underpinnings, whole of curriculum considerations, and its support of learning in clinical settings. In specific topics, it offers approaches to assessment, evidence-based educational methods, governance, quality improvement, scholarship and leadership in health professions education, and some forecasting of trends and practices. This book is an invaluable resource for students, educators, academics and anyone interested in health professions education.