Empathy In Healthcare Essay

An Epidemic of Empathy in Healthcare: How to Deliver Compassionate Connected Patient Care that Creates a Competitive Advantage was the book I chose to read for this assignment. I chose this book because in reading the reviews of the book and the summary, I found it to be a topic of current discussion among my associates and colleagues. The title of this book stood out to me and, after further inquiry, I realized it gave insight to one of the major problems in the delivery of healthcare today.

Healthcare has become like an assembly line; the patient goes in, gets a diagnosis, and receives a similar treatment to the next person with that same diagnosis. While it is true that treatment for many chronic conditions are the same, it is the application

Christakis and Fowler developed the Rules of Life in the Network, which are used to show how empathy can be spread across the healthcare system. The network has the important aspect of connections having connections and contagion, which simply means anything that flows across the times. The author list the five rules: We shape our network, Our networks shape us, Our friends affect us Our friends’ friends affect us, and the network has a life of its own. The author suggests that, based on the work of Christakis Fowler, and others, in order to create empathy in healthcare that is longstanding a few things must occur. Some of those things include identifying the lonely parts of a facility’s network, implementing the use of financial and other incentives, bringing together the positive influences of your network in order to create a powerful influence, and organizing multidisciplinary teams more

The author also suggests that social capital be a major concern, as you want a competent, dependable workforce who will deliver high value care to patients. He states there is a certain level of pride in delivering empathic healthcare to patients. I agree with him regarding that. When something goes wrong in the body it can be a frightening ordeal. No way to make that worse than to have cold, uncaring nursing, physicians, etc., providing care. The very nature of what medical personnel are to do is to provide care. It is difficult to do that effectively without actually caring first. This book offered some suggestions on how to develop empathy if you are a person with