General Health Tips & News


Empathy Training Skills for Physicians


By A.S. (staff writer) , published on May 05, 2022



Medicine Telehealth Health Empathy skills for Physcians


 

Employability is defined as "a set of accomplishments — talents, understandings, and personal characteristics  that people learned to acquire employment and succeed in their preferred jobs, benefiting themselves, the workforce, the community, and the economy" (Yorke, 2004, page 21).

The idea of drawing forth learning, progress, and qualities that would otherwise go unnoticed and unrecognized is something that both employability and reflection have in common.

In that case, the reflection would assist you in identifying your abilities and learning how to build them into concrete examples.

You can use reflection to:

  1. Determine what kinds of experiences and skills you already have and what you'll need to improve your employability.

  2. Find particular scenarios in which you have used your strengths and shortcomings so that you may effectively explain them to others.

  3. Keep track of the talents you want to increase and that you'll need to succeed in your chosen field.

  4. Make well-informed decisions about what success means to you.

Practical experience, reflection, motivation, and support influence the degree and rate of progress through the stages.

 

Empathy is very important in the physician-patient connection and has a very positive impact on health outcomes. However, as the field of empathy grows, the lack of conceptual coherence poses an obstacle to medical progress. Interpersonal sensitivity, emotional empathy, cognitive empathy, and care are theoretically clarified by functional neuroimaging studies of health professionals, which evaluate patterns of brain activation in response to empathy-eliciting situations.

These elements are generally autonomous, yet they frequently interact and are intricately woven into the brain's structure. Nonetheless, it appears to be evident.

Sympathy and empathy, which are sometimes mistaken, are not the same thing. Empathy is a reflection of emotional understanding, whereas sympathy is an expression of emotional care. Empathy plays important role in domains like medicine, where effective patient-physician interactions are critical to successful patient treatment.

 

     Empathy is the ability to understand the feelings of others. Every physician should understand and respect the emotional behavior of the patients. They should treat them and behave as a savior of their health. Counseling about the disease and medicines is the primary role of the practitioners. These responsibilities should be fulfilled with empathy and kindness.  

      Being a good listener was usually mentioned as one of the qualities required of a good physician. Every patient wants to be treated as a person, not as an illness, and to feel confident that the doctor is aware of the nonmedical components of his or her situation. A prescriber may be paying close attention to a patient, but the only way the patient will know is if the doctor shows that he understands the patient's worries by responding empathically. Empathy is a vital clinical skill if the purpose of medicine is to treat the patient—to alleviate suffering rather than simply cure disease.

Patients have expressed a desire for a more personal relationship with their caregivers. Clinical empathy, according to studies, makes patients feel respected and acknowledged in their sickness experiences (Beckman et al. 1994). Within this perspective, efforts have been made to shift the medical approach toward a relationship-centered care model, in which the human dimension is prioritized and patients' experiences are valued. Clinical empathy is defined as a technique for assisting patients in experiencing and expressing their feelings.

Every physician should show respect for human dignity, respect for self-determination and autonomy, the primacy of patient welfare, the principle of non-injury, and solidarity. Despite the fact that medical practice is improving all the time, it is still not up to the expectations of the patients. Many things are significantly better than they were, but a few things need to be improved.  What patients expect is what they can understand, which often equates to an attitude perception. Kindness, effective communication, honesty, reliability, and trust — the interpersonal aspects of doctoring that are crucial to patient perception – are woven into the fabric of the cloak of invisibility that continues to elude a fuller explanation of the phenomenon.

   These logical explanations conclude that empathy is crucial to patient’s health as it develop the patients trust in physicians. It is also important in developing patient’s compliance with medication. So these behavioral qualities should be the part of training institutions curriculum during their course of education.

 

 

References

Brown, A. E. (2017). The need for empathetic healthcare systems. Retrieved from Joural of Medical Ethics: https://jme.bmj.com/content/47/12/e27

Elliot M. Hirsch, M. (2007). The Role of Empathy in Medicine: A Medical Student's Perspective. AMA Journal of Ethics, 423-427.

Maria Moudatsou, A. S. (2020). The Role of Empathy in Health and Social Care Professionals. Healthcare, 1-8.

Traversa, C. G. (2021). Empathy in patient care: from ‘Clinical Empathy’ to ‘Empathic Concern’. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy , 573–585 .

 

 




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