Empathy in Health Care: Health Affairs Blog Post Highlights Benefits and Obstacles
In a recent post published on the Health Affairs Blog, patient advocate Aubrey Hill writes about the impact of empathy in improving health outcomes. Hill, who draws on her experiences with the Colorado Coalition for the Medically Underserved, explores social and environmental factors that affect health and care, and suggests that the use of empathy in the health care setting can help to overcome some of these obstacles.
A 2012 study from Italy analyzed the health outcomes of more than 20,000 patients with diabetes, who were assigned to three different groups of physicians (pre-evaluated for their levels of empathy). The physicians who demonstrated the highest degrees of empathy achieved the best results with their patients; the patients had statistically significant lower levels of diabetic complications than the groups whose physicians had scored lower in empathy.
