Empathy Matters in Healthcare - A Spotlight on Dr. Helen Riess

My weekly Purposeful Empathy newsletter is dedicated to amplifying the voices of people from around the globe who believe the world needs more empathy - and are doing something about it. Since I’ll be speaking at the International Congress on Whole Person Care this month, I’m shining a spotlight on empathy experts dedicated to improving the delivery of healthcare.

Dr. Helen Riess is a practising psychiatrist and associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In 2010, she wrote an article entitled "Empathy in Medicine-A Neurobiological Perspective" that transformed how physicians view empathy.?

Her book, The Empathy Effect, did the same for me. Here are three of my favourite quotes:

• "The more you experience in life and come to realize that all human beings share comparable emotions, the greater is your empathic capacity for all mankind, not just those close to you."
• "Only when we can deem all human beings worthy of respect and empathy, overcoming our natural inclination to place them in out-groups, will civilizations realize peaceful co-existence."
• "If one thing has become abundantly clear, it is that empathy informs a vital intergenerational, interracial, and international perspective that must be valued, vaulted, and cultivated on a grand scale."

Early in her career, Helen discovered that empathy can be learned and cultivated. In fact, her research demonstrated that healthcare providers who exhibited greater empathy not only improved patient care but were also perceived as more competent by their patients.

That’s what motivated her to found Empathetics.com, a company specialized in evidence-based empathy training. She also developed the E.M.P.A.T.H.Y approach, whereby each letter of the acronym represents a key element of empathic communication:“E” for eye contact, “M” for muscles of facial expression, “P” for posture, “A” for affect (emotion), “T” for tone of voice, “H” for hearing the whole person, and “Y” for your response.?

Her E.M.P.A.T.H.Y training has not only improved patient care within the medical field, it has also benefited educators, law enforcement, and management professionals. Watch her inspiring TEDx talk, The Power of Empathy, (incidentally, the same name as my TEDx talk!) to learn more.?

In my podcast interview with her, she told me that an organization’s strength can be measured by the empathy and compassion exhibited by its members. She is on a mission to help leaders transform those organizations into compassionate care systems.?

Given all the suffering in the world today, let's hope E.M.P.A.T.H.Y goes viral.

Want to learn more about Empathy in Healthcare? Order my debut book, Purposeful Empathy: Tapping Our Hidden Superpower for Personal, Organizational, and Social Change.

Watch my Purposeful Empathy interview with Helen Riess on YouTube here or listen to it as a podcast on your favourite platform (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts).