Introduction/Background:
Empathy has been shown to contribute to enhanced patient satisfaction and trust, decreased litigation, increased adherence and better clinical outcomes in medical consultations.
Failure to explore the client’s perspective and expectations has also been shown to reduce client satisfaction in veterinary consultations.
Objectives:
To explore how clients express their emotional concerns and how veterinary students respond to these concerns.
Methods
Video recordings of 14 consultations were analysed for verbal expressions of emotional concerns by clients and for responses by the veterinary students conducting the consultation. Suchman et al’s model of empathic communication was used as the basis for a directed content thematic analysis of the transcripts of these consultations (Suchman et al, 1997).
Findings:
All clients expressed multiple emotional concerns during the consultation. These “empathic opportunities” were often indirect and subtle rather than explicit mentions of their concern or a particular emotion. Thirteen of the 15 students did not respond to the majority of these empathic opportunities and often terminated the opportunity by adhering to a narrow biomedical focus. Clients would often return to a concern or emotion on several occasions, frequently with increasing urgency. When clinicians entered the room and initiated a conversation with the client, they also missed these empathic opportunities.
Discussion:
Students need more experience and feedback to enable them to pick up and respond to both the explicit expression and subtle cues of clients’ emotional concerns. Training clinical staff to model this practice will also need to be incorporated into the development of further teaching.
SUCHMAN, A. L., MARKAKIS, K., BECKMAN, H. B. & FRANKEL, R. 1997. A model of empathic communication in the medical interview. Jama, 277, 678-82
Author:
*YELLAND, Jody, WHITTLESTONE, Kim
LIVE Center for Excellence, Royal Veterinary College, LONDON, UK
|