The HHRF organised a workshop on Empathy on June 10th 2024.
Empathy was chosen as the keyword for the event because it is a term in which healthcare professionals and humanities scholars have a considerable stake. In her introduction to the event, Dr Shital Pravinchandra (Comparative Literature, School of the Arts) noted that humanities scholars are typically characterised – if not caricatured - as empathisers, while a similar caricature is that of an uncaring medical profession.
Speakers and attendees discussed why it is important to cultivate empathy in healthcare settings, but also whether one can teach empathy, whether it is a valuable or desirable skill to cultivate, and whether the valorisation of empathy might pose risks to both healthcare professionals and patients.
In our first panel, Dr Agnieszka Lyons (Linguistics) discussed the value of listening and reading body language in the cultivation of empathy in psychotherapeutic settings. Dr Robin Basu (Blizard Institute) asked whether having children of one’s own made one a more empathic paediatrician, while Dr Maria Turri (Wolfson Institute) turned to questions of spectatorship, asking whether too much empathy can make for a complacent, unengaged audience. The discussion returned to the clinical encounter, raising questions of when too much empathy from a clinician may be a problem, the brevity of clinician-patient interactions, and finishing with the question: what if the patient doesn’t want to empathise with the clinician, or be the recipient of empathy?
The second panel began with a discussion of the origins of the term empathy. As Prof Will McMorran (Comparative Literature) pointed out, the term only entered the English language in 1909. Prof Janet Harbord, who runs the Wellcome-funded “Autism through Cinema” project, reminded us that empathy – or its perceived absence – is used to pathologise patients, a prominent example being people with autism. Dr Louise Ashley (School of Business and Management) discussed the role of empathy in medical specialisation. Dr Ashley also questioned whether the display of empathy towards patients affects one’s chances of promotion in the healthcare sector, and empathy’s perceived link with healthcare providers’ class and gender. Mr Harvey Wells (Clinical Communication Skills Unit) offered a fascinating proposition: that medical students often become less empathetic as their medical degree progresses. Wells suggested this may be due to students sensing this to be “the way” a medical professional should present themselves.
The sense of self-presentation was raised during the discussion that followed. The questions we raised are central to healthcare in the 21st century: where does touch and consent fit into the patient encounter? Where do language skills and translation fit with creating empathetic healthcare in a multicultural society? As an example of the possibilities that the QMUL Health Humanities Research Forum offers, the range of disciplinary expertise that was convened indicates not only the range of health research undertaken at the University, but the possibilities that may emerge when these different specialisms and approaches are brought into dialogue.
Photo by Nappy on Unsplash