Context: Our understanding of clinical empathy could be enhanced through qualitative research-research currently under-represented in the field. Physician associates within the UK undergo an intensive 2-year postgraduate medical education. As a new group of health professionals, they represent a fresh pair of eyes through which to examine clinical empathy, its nature and teaching.
Methods: Working with a constructivist paradigm, utilising grounded theory methodology, researchers studied 19 purposively sampled physician associate students in two UK medical schools. One-to-one semi-structured interviews were transcribed verbatim. Data were analysed using a grounded theory approach.
Results: The global themes were , and a novel term to describe the discomfort students experience when pressurised into making empathic statements they don't sincerely feel. Students preferred using non-verbal over verbal expressions of empathy. A conceptual model is proposed. The more substantial empathic pathway, affective empathy, involves input from the heart. An alternative empathy, more constrained, comes from the head: cognitive empathy was considered a solution to time pressure and emotional burden. Formal teaching establishes empathic dissonance, a problem which stems from over-reliance on the empathic statement as the means to deliver clinical empathy.
Conclusions: This study furthers our understanding of the construct and teaching of empathy. It identifies empathic barriers, especially time pressure. It proposes a novel concept-a concept that challenges medical educationalists to reframe future empathy teaching.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7224074 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40670-020-00979-0 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Structure of resilience: A Machiavellian contribution or 'paddle your own canoe'.
PLoS One
April 2024
Faculty of Legal and Business Studies, Department of Psychology, Dr Lazar Vrkatić, Novi Sad, Serbia.
According to biobehavioral synchronicity model, empathy-a fundamental requirement for reciprocal and prosocial behavior-is at the core of rebound from stress, an essential feature of resilience. However, there are also reports on antagonistic traits-characterized by empathic deficit-bolstering immunity to stress. In the literature there is also inconclusive evidence regarding gender-related differences in resilience.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBeing kind in unkind spaces: a qualitative examination of how medical educators and first year medical students perceive empathy training.
Front Sociol
January 2024
Department of Sociology and Criminology, Kent State University, Kent, OH, United States.
Introduction: It has become for healthcare systems to tout their ability to provide compassionate medical care that addresses the emotional as well as physical needs of patients. Not surprisingly, then, there is considerable pressure on medical schools to train their students to be empathic. Existing literature on empathy training in medicine tends to focus on how to build emotional intelligence in individual trainees, largely ignoring the sociocultural factors that contribute to or thwart empathy development in medical school.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe dark side of empathy in narcissistic personality disorder.
Front Psychiatry
March 2023
Department of Mental Health and Addiction, Health Care Trust-IRCCS San Gerardo Monza, Monza, Italy.
Narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by self-absorption, grandiosity, exploitation of others and lack of empathy. People with that disorder may switch from an overt form, mainly with grandiosity, to a covert presentation, with fears, hypersensitivity and dependence from others. Empathy represents a key point in detecting people affected by narcissistic personality disorder because, even if it is described as reduced, it plays a fundamental role in exploitation and manipulation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMoral Orientation, Moral Decision-Making, and Moral Distress Among Critical Care Physicians: A Qualitative Study.
Crit Care Explor
March 2023
Center for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences and Division of Critical Care, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Unlabelled: Moral distress is common among critical care physicians and can impact negatively healthcare individuals and institutions. Better understanding inter-individual variability in moral distress is needed to inform future wellness interventions.
Objectives: To explore when and how critical care physicians experience moral distress in the workplace and its consequences, how physicians' professional interactions with colleagues affected their perceived level of moral distress, and in which circumstances professional rewards were experienced and mitigated moral distress.
Health and social care practitioners' experiences of exercising professional curiosity in child protection practice: An integrative review.
Health Soc Care Community
November 2022
Formerly Oxford Institute of Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Research (OxINMAHR), Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK ('retired').
This integrative review aims to evaluate the experiences of health and social care practitioners with regard to how they exercise professional curiosity in child protection practice. Professional curiosity gained significant currency following the Munro Review of Child Protection (2010) in England, as a means of seeking clarity on what is happening within a family. However, a recurrent finding from child safeguarding practice reviews is that practitioners continue to struggle to exercise curiosity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!