Empathy is an essential building block for compassion

Exercise: What does empathy mean to you? Attempt to define empathy and illustrate it with examples.

 Cognitive Empathy

• Capacity to understand others’ perspectives, to see how others think about things and to know cognitively how they are feeling

Emotional Empathy

• Capacity to sense how the other person is reacting, to feel with the other, to have an emotional connection

Empathic Concern

• Not only understanding the other’s predicament and to feel with them, but also to spontaneously want to take action to help them

Empathy is a Two-Stage Process

1. Understanding and sensitive appreciation of another person’s predicament or feelings
2. Communication of that understanding back to the patient in a supportive manner

Understanding your patient’s predicament and feelings

Provide an atmosphere that facilitates disclosure

• Welcome your patient warmly
• Clarify your patient’s agenda and expectations
• Attentively listen
• Facilitate disclosure from your patient: paraphrasing, repetition
• Encourage expression of feelings/thoughts
• Pick up on your patient’s cues, checking your interpretations/assumptions
• Use internal summaries, acceptance, non-judgmental responses, silence
• Encourage your patient to contribute as an equal
• Offer your patient choices

• Use empathy to communicate understanding and appreciation of your patient’s feelings or predicament
• Overtly acknowledge your patient’s views and feelings

Communicate Empathy to your patient

Communicate your understanding back to your patient so they know that you appreciate and are sensitive to their difficulty

1. Non-verbal communication
   • Facial expression, proximity, touch, tone of voice, use of silence
2. Verbal communication
   • Empathic statements: supportive comments that specifically link the ‘I’ of the doctor and the ‘you’ of the patient

‘I can appreciate how difficult this must be for you to talk about’

‘I can sense how angry you have been feeling about your illness’

‘I can see that you are very upset about her behavior’

Silverman, J., Kurtz, S., & Draper, J. (2013). Skills for Communicating with Patients (Thrid Edit). London: Radcliffe Publishing.