Exploring Empathy with Medical Students

by David Ian Jeffrey

Overview

This book investigates new insights into the factors influencing empathy in medical students. Addressing the widely perceived empathy gap in teaching and medical practice, the book presents a new study into how this emotion is facilitated in the UK undergraduate medical curriculum, and its influence on doctor-patient relationships. The author utilises Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to investigate how medical students’ perspective on empathy changed throughout their education. It presents the risks students perceive when connecting emotionally with patients; their use of detachment as a taught coping mechanism; and the question of how they regulate their emotions. 
The book reveals the tension between students’ connection with and detachment from a patient and their aim to achieve an appropriate balance. The author presents a number of factors which seem to enhance empathy, and explores the balance of scientific biomedical versus psychosocial approaches in medical training. In contrast to the commonly-reported opinion that there has been decline in medical students’ empathy, this book contends that student empathy in fact increased during their training. This new study offers invaluable insight into how students and practitioners may be supported in dealing appropriately with their emotions as well as with those of their patients, thereby facilitating more humane medical care.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030112110
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	01/28/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	397 KB

About the Author

David Ian Jeffrey is Honorary Lecturer in Palliative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, UK and formerly Consultant in Palliative Medicine, Cheltenham UK. Previous published books include, Medical Mentoring (2014) and (co-author E. Jeffrey) Enhancing Compassion in End-of-Life Care Through Drama (2013).

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: The research setting and study design.- Chapter 3: Empathy: from attribute to relationship.- Chapter 4: Emotions and Empathy.- Chapter 5: Enhancing Empathy.- Chapter 6: Barriers to empathy: The Medical School Culture.- Chapter 7: Barriers to empathy: The Curriculum.- Chapter 8: Changes in students’ empathy during their training.- Chapter 9: Summary and Implications.

Editorial Reviews

Reviewer: Peter J Whitehouse, MD-PhD(Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine)
Description: Empathy is an essential aspect of what it means to be fully human — and an improvable skill. I found similar patterns in the author's concepts to results in my own work and appreciate the author's story, as one also active in health education transformation. In other words, I empathize with this project and this person.
Purpose: This well-described qualitative research project helps readers conceptualize empathy and understand the challenges medical education presents to enhancing this skill set. The students in this project show how conceptions of empathy change even over short time periods from an ability that is associated with an individual to a process that emerges from relationships.
Audience: The audience is medical educators.
Features: Relationship-based care should be central to practice, especially in the interprofessional models of care emerging today. Much of relationship is created by sharing stories between the healer and the subject of care and among healthcare practitioners (and administrators) themselves. At the foundation of co-creating healthy narratives is the appreciation of patterns in the stories of the person to be cared for, whether patient or colleague. As students progress in their learning journey, they become more perceptive about the patterns of illness and how to enhance their relational and narrative abilities as pattern-modifying healers. The book ends with some thoughts about how we can enhance empathy and brief mentions of the humanities.
Assessment: The humanities offer a rich source of data about how people pattern their lives and how illness disrupts this fabric. The arts and humanities ask us to step back from our preconceptions, reflect critically on new possibilities, and understand broad context as we explore the patterns in our own lives as healers, especially in our networks of relationships with other people.

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