Robin Youngson is an anesthesiologist in New Zealand. He is
an International leader in the compassionate healthcare movement and
founded
HEARTS
in HEALTHCARE
whichis
an inspirational community of health professionals, students, patient
advocates, health leaders, and many others who are champions for
compassionate care. "We believe bringing like-minded people together is
the first step to re-humanizing healthcare around the world".
Robin is author of
TIME TO CARE: How to love your
patients and your job. He says, "my passion is to restore the heart of
healthcare and to make caring and compassion the daily lived experience
and practice of all in healthcare. Health professionals need compassion
and caring in the workplace as much as patients - the rates of burnout,
emotional exhaustion and hopelessness are far too high."
Sub Conference: Health Care
Jodi Halpern. M.D., Ph.D, is Associate Professor of
Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley,
in the Joint Medical Program and the School of Public Health. As a
psychiatrist with a background in philosophy, she investigates how emotions
and the imagination shape healthcare decisions of clinicians and patients. She is author of
From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice.
Clinical Empathy: "As a psychiatrist as well as
a faculty member in bioethics at UC Berkeley for almost two decades, I’ve
investigated what happens to patients when their doctors show a lack of
empathy. Doctors were trained to believe that emotional detachment from
patients is personally and professionally necessary, but experience shows
that patients don’t trust doctors who are aloof or superficially friendly.
Yet, only recently have studies proven just how harmful detachment and how
beneficial empathy is for healing...."
Sub Conference: Health Care and Science
Helen Riess, M.D. is Associate Clinical Professor of
Psychiatry,
Harvard Medical School and Director of the Empathy and Relational Science
Program at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The mission of the Program is to enhance empathy and
interpersonal relationships in healthcare. She is also Chief Technology
Officer of Empathetics
which offers scientifically based empathy training proven to optimize
interpersonal engagement.
Helen is a coauthor of the study,
Empathy Training for Resident Physicians. The study concluded;
"A brief intervention grounded in the neurobiology of empathy
significantly improved the physician empathy as rated by patients,
suggesting that the quality of care in medicine could be improved by
integrating the neuroscience of empathy into the medical education."
Empathy is like,
getting underneath the skin of another person, to merge temporarily with
their experience, then getting out, to reflect on the experience.
Empathy can be taught, although a certain endowment may be inborn,
research shows that it is a mutable trait. Our study demonstrated that
empathy could be increased significantly in the training group and it
decreased significantly in the control group. Sub Conference: Health Care
Melanie Sears has been a trainer for the Center of
Nonviolent Communications since 1991. She works with businesses,
hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, individuals, couples and parents in
transforming their usual way of operations, interpersonal interactions and
dealing with conflict to one which is more compassionate, conscious and
effective.
Dorrie Fontaine, is
Dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Virginia. At the school
she started the Compassionate Care & Empathic Leadership Initiative (CCELI)
"which exists to create dialogue around and preparedness for nurses who
deal every day with people in life-changing situations–one-time or chronic
illness, terminal disease, end-of-life care and even death itself–and all
the highly-charged, complex issues surrounding them.
The
CCELI focuses on systems that optimize patients’ and their family’s
quality of life, incorporate compassion and empathy into personal
behavior, interprofessional interactions and encounters with patients
and families. We’re developing clinical, educational and research
initiatives that further those aims. Our ultimate vision is to reduce
human suffering and promote health and well-being by fostering
compassionate people and systems."
"Can compassion be taught? UVa Nursing's all volunteer army of nurses,
physicians, administrators, professors and students are learning
concrete ways to insert compassion into every patient interaction -- and
they're bolstering their own resilience in the process."
How do those providing objective medical care,
especially around the grim subject of one's own death, provide
compassionate care without absorbing the emotions surrounding imminent
death?
Please describe your work and why the principle of
empathy is relevant to it?
The theory of Counter-Transference in Psychology
postulates that the practitioner's feelings are entangled with the
patient's. Does this also happen in the medical field? etc. Sub
Conference: Health Care
Richard Levin is an internationally recognized physician
scientist, scholar, cardiologist and educator. He is also the President
and CEO of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation. The Gold Foundation is a
not-for-profit organization dedicated to fostering humanism in medicine.
"It encourages the development of physicians who combine the high tech
skills of cutting-edge medical science with the high touch skills of
communication, empathy and compassion."
The organization says that, "As the
nature of doctor-patient relationship changes, compassion and empathy
are essential." The Foundation fosters the development of empathy in
healthcare thought a variety of ways and initiatives, such as,
lectures, conferences, physician networking, grants, fostering
scientific research, award ceremonies, a website, etc. Sub Conference: Health Care
Helen Riess, M.D. is Associate Clinical Professor of
Psychiatry,
Harvard Medical School and Director of the Empathy and Relational Science
Program at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The mission of the Program is to enhance empathy and
interpersonal relationships in healthcare. She is also Chief Technology
Officer of Empathetics
which offers scientifically based empathy training proven to optimize
interpersonal engagement.
Helen is a coauthor of the study,
Empathy Training for Resident Physicians. The study concluded;
"A brief intervention grounded in the neurobiology of empathy
significantly improved the physician empathy as rated by patients,
suggesting that the quality of care in medicine could be improved by
integrating the neuroscience of empathy into the medical education."
Empathy is like,
getting underneath the skin of another person, to merge temporarily with
their experience, then getting out, to reflect on the experience.
Empathy can be taught, although a certain endowment may be inborn,
research shows that it is a mutable trait. Our study demonstrated that
empathy could be increased significantly in the training group and it
decreased significantly in the control group. Sub Conference: Health Care
James Doty
is Stanford Clinical Professor of
Neurosurgery and founding director of the Center for the Study of Compassion and
Altruism Research and Education (CCARE. 'CCARE is striving to
create a community of scholars and researchers, including neuroscientists,
psychologists, educators and philosophical and contemplative thinkers around
the study of compassion.'
He says we have to go beyond
mindfulness to
a transcendent connection between people. We can get beyond loneliness, isolation
and depression to have a more sustained
happiness,
by contributing to
the wellbeing of others.
Sub
Conference: Science
Issidoros Sarinopoulos (Sid) is Assistant Professor of
Psychology at
Michigan State University where he is director of the Lab for Social and
Affective Neuroscience. Sid's research interests include the psychological
and neural underpinnings of emotion, judgment, decision making, and social
behavior.
His work integrates the theories and methods of
affective and social neuroscience on the one hand, and more traditional
disciplines in the social sciences on the other.
Sid was part of a study looking at how an empathic
doctor-patient relationship reduces patients pain.
Listen up, doc: Empathy raises patients’ pain tolerance.
"A doctor-patient relationship built on trust and empathy
doesn’t just put patients at ease – it actually changes the brain’s
response to stress and increases pain tolerance, according to new findings
from a Michigan State University research team."
Sub Conferences: Health Care
and Science
Louise Grant
is Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Bedfordshire.
Louise has been studying the role of empathy in fostering resilience in
social workers in the UK.
She says, "My teaching interests are in children and families social work
and in particular in developing reflective practice for effective social
work and developing supervision knowledge and skills in social workers. My
research focus is on reflective practice and developing emotional
resilience for social work practice"
Louise is co-author of the
study, 'Exploring Stress Resilience in Trainee Social Workers: The
Role of Emotional and Social Competencies'.
In order to inform the development of interventions to enhance the
work-related well-being of early career social workers, this study
examined several emotional and social competencies (i.e. emotional
intelligence, reflective ability, empathy and social competence) as
predictors of resilience in 240 trainees.
We had a wonderful meeting at
the first Empathy Healthcare Café on June 25th, 2009. We received so many comments
like, "great Café", "what's next?" and "how can we keep this going?" Thank
you to everyone that contributed time, energy, ideas, stories, video,
supplies, resources,
etc. to hosting the Café. Below is the video of the Café.
From Joan. "Thank you for attending and creating a special evening. As many of
you mentioned to me the energy and ideas in the room were truly inspiring! The
list that is attached is a compilation of the ideas everyone contributed
during the action item session. There
were many comments, in your reflections and after the close of the Café about
“let’s keep going.” If you would like to get together to put your ideas into
the next phase just respond to this email, and then we can pick a time, and
place to work on an Empathy Grass Roots Movement." Joan Kuenz
