Adriana E. Foster - Teaching Empathy in Healthcare: Building a New Core Competency

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All clinicians seek to deliver high-quality healthcare. That is why we have become doctors, nurses, or allied healthcare professionals in the first place. We care about our patients, and we want to be able to give them the most effective care possible, in order to cure their diseases or, when cure is not possible, alleviate symptoms and maximize health. Why? Because health is a resource for living. Our job is to help people live well.

Nowadays, the young clinician is bombarded with a variety of concepts to understand and learn to integrate into everyday work: evidence-based medicine, technical skills, communications skills, shared decision-making, self-management support, patient activation, patient empowerment, health literacy, to name but a few. But do they understand that empathy is fundamental to all of these? And are they taught the art and science of empathy? Do they know how to improve their empathy and how to get the professional balance rightthe right amount of empathy, at the right time? And do they understand the wider determinants of health and the way that empathy can be undermined or thwarted by the high pressureand at times brutalizingenvironment that healthcare often operates in?

If (as I suspect is often the case) the answers to many of these questions is no, then help is at hand.Teaching Empathy in Healthcare: Building a New Core Competency, edited by Adriana Foster and Zimri Yaseen, and with contributions from over 40 co-authors, is a comprehensive, up-to-date account of empathy in the clinical context. Set to become a classic text on the subject, the book takes the reader on an engaging three-part journey from understanding what empathy is (and how it can be measured) to approaches to empathy education, and finally to a systemic perspective, addressing issues such as equity, stigma, and law. Each section is packed full of the latest evidence-base, including the remarkable strides that have been made over recent decades in the neurobiology of empathy.

Although many books have been written on empathy in medicine over the last 20 years or so since I became active in research in this area, this new book is different from those that have come before. It draws on a very wide range of contributors across many disciplines and takes an unashamedly evidence-based approach. It takes a longitudinal approach to clinical empathy, emphasizing the benefits of embedding empathy training in undergraduate and post-graduate curricula, but also the need to reinforce the importance of empathy according to the clinicians stage of professional development. Empathy is not something to be learnt quickly in first year of medical school, but a professional skill and attitude for the entire clinical career. Finally, and very importantly, it broadens its scope to include the societal and institutional factors that relate to whether empathy is fostered and nurtured, or not, within our healthcare systems.

I enjoyed reading this book, and I learned a lot from it. I am sure you will too. Enjoy, digest, imbue, share, and implement! Our patients deserve nothing less.

The authors thank Anjelica Halim, Laura Ayala, and Emily Jurich who, in addition to their contributions as chapter authors, provided essential editorial assistance for this book. We also thank Sarai Yaseen and Phil Kao for their editorial assistance and Phil Kao, Chris Barnes, and Jason Sharpe for their constructive discourse.