The Importance Of Empathy In Healthcare

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Recommended: rogers (1959) defines empathy as “the ability of health care professionals to accurately understand patients, emotionally and mentally, as though they were in the patient’s shoes, but without losing their status”

Clinical interactions between patients and healthcare professionals is one of the most important parts of medical care. Over the years the medical profession has become more patient driven. The clinicians are starting to focus more on the patient’s views on consultation and overall care. Empathy is a necessary part of this clinician-patient interaction. I believe that Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagine life from their perspective. A clinician who is empathetic will be able to better assist the patients that he or she is caring for, because they take time to listen to their patients and use what they learn about the patient to care for them more effectively. Patients can tell whether the healthcare professional is being empathetic and this can also play a large role in the health outcome of patients. CARE (Consultation and Relational Empathy) is a patient survey that accesses the interaction and level of empathy that physician or medical professional had with the patient. The Jefferson Scale of empathy is used by physicians to reflect their own opinion on the level empathy and interaction that they provided. The overall results of these two test would most likely be very similar. Patients as well as physicians have the ability to realize when a connection is being made and when there genuine understanding or …show more content…

For example, a clinician may be talking down to a patient and not really listening to their problems. This could make the patient feel as if the clinician does not care about them even when the clinician really is trying to help. Time might be another factor that could create differences between the two tests. Busy practices may have several people waiting in line, which cause the staff to be in a hurry. This may cause patients to feel as if the clinician doesn’t have time to give

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