The Caring Professionals Program: educational approaches that integrate caring attitudes and empathic behaviors into health professions education.

Caring attitudes and empathic behaviors are considered by most Americans to be an essential and intrinsic element of appropriate health care, yet little attention is given to this in the curricula of most healthcare professional training programs. This paper describes an ongoing educational intervention to develop healthcare professionals with caring attitudes and empathic behaviors that will be sustained in their professional practice environments. The Caring Professionals Program was designed to enhance and redesign existing learning experiences in four academic programs: physical therapy, occupational therapy, physician assistant, and nurse practitioner.