Empathy, Goals of Care & Training Opportunities to Improve Your Communication Skills and Teaching

Empathy plays an important role in all of healthcare communication, but it's especially heightened when clinicians are working with patients with serious illness and their families.  Journal of Palliative Medicine published an article by Vital Talk's Tony Back and Bob Arnold recently about the role empathy can play in the delineation of goals of care for seriously ill patients.  Empathy without any specific action is valuable to the suffering person.  Merely being understood often times has some ameliorative impact on the suffering person and fosters a therapeutic relationship, even when some problems cannot be solved. However, in the face of insoluble problems (e.g. cancer not responding to chemotherapy), patients understandably want helpful action, and clinicians still want to act.  Do something that will help me!  What can I do to help myself?  The question is, how do we figure out how to direct both our energy and the patient's? Back, Arnold, and others have written extensively on this topic, and the current article adds even more nuance to goals of care exploration.  They write about how patient emotion can be translated into meaningful action that moves patients towards achievable goals of care.  They recommend the following steps:See affect as a "spotlight"-  be curious about the reasons for the emotion.  Don't assume sadness is exclusively about dying.  The first step is merely recognizing the spotlight, even...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Carer Workers Authors: Source Type: blogs