Teaching empathy in an interprofessional setting with a focus on decategorization: Introducing I-Team

Teaching interprofessional collaboration among future healthcare professionals

Healthcare has become more complex in recent years. Such complexity can best be addressed by interprofessional teams. We argue that to ensure successful communication and cooperation in interprofessional teams, it is important to establish interprofessional education in health-related study programs. More precisely, we argue that students in health-related programs need to develop interprofessional competencies and a common language, experience interprofessional contact, build inclusive identities and establish beliefs in the benefit of interprofessional diversity. We give examples how these goals can be implemented in interprofessional education. We also discuss challenges and future avenues for respective research healthcare professionals.

Challenging the clinically-situated emotion-deficient version of empathy within medicine and medical education research

In this paper, we argue that the notion of a clinically-situated empathy (e.g. physician empathy), is potentially problematic as it perpetuates an emotion-deficient version of empathy within medicine and medicine education research. Utilizing classic and contemporary empathy theory from various social science disciplines, we discuss how empathy in the general sense differs conceptually from clinically-situated empathy-paying particular attention to the role of emotional contagion. To highlight this contrast, we draw upon Hojat et al.'s model of physician empathy and how this body of work reflects broader medical-cultural norms that problematize the role and impact of emotions within the clinical encounter. Alternatively, we present a more encompassing model of empathy drawing upon the fields of social-psychology and social-neuroscience in order to bring the notion of "feeling with" and emotional contagion more specifically, into medical education, medical education research, and medicine more generally.

Empathy, better patient care, and how interprofessional education can help

Interprofessional education (IPE) has been promoted as one way to prepare healthcare students for interprofessional encounters they might experience in the workplace. However, the link between IPE, interprofessional care in the workforce, and better patient outcomes is tenuous, perhaps in part due to the inability of IPE programs to adequately address barriers associated with interprofessional care (e.g., power differentials, role disputes). Empathy, or understanding the experiences of others, has emerged as a critical tool to breaking down barriers inherent to working in teams. Given the evidence connecting empathy to stronger team collaboration and better patient care, researchers significantly revamped programming from a prior training called Interprofessional Education for Complex Neurological Cases (IPE Neuro) to enhance empathy, foster stronger team collaboration, and improve information integration among participants. In this improved three-session program, participants from seven different professions were grouped into teams, assessed a patient volunteer with neurological disorder, and created and presented an integrated, patient-centric treatment plan. Students (N = 31) were asked to report general empathy levels, as well as attitudes, team skills, and readiness toward interprofessional care, before and after the program. We conducted paired samples t-tests and thematic analysis to analyze the data. Results showed that participants reported higher empathy levels, more positive attitudes, and greater team skills pre- to posttest with moderate to large effects. Results bolster IPE Neuro programming as one approach to prepare students for interprofessional care while underscoring the potential implications of IPE to improve empathy levels of healthcare professionals.