Building More Trust Between Doctors and Patients: Empathetic Physician-Patient Relationship

Empathetic Physician-Patient Relationship
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Empathetic Physician-Patient Relationship
Patient care is a practice that often requires carers to show empathy, meaning being able to perceive and understand the world from someone else’s perspective. Cognitive and emotive abilities are a necessity for empathy to manifest. Research has attempted to explore the usefulness of empathy. Some observers believe that empathy saves time, money, and lives. The focus of this paper is to find evidence from scholarly sources to support this claim by Casey et al. (2018). First, the essay will explore what these authors mean by this statement. Second, scholarly sources will be examined for their perspectives on this claim.
Empathetic patient relationships are something often encouraged in patient care. However, a few writers and researchers have explored the question of why it is a necessity. In this case, Casey et al. (2018) argue that an empathetic relationship is needed for more effective treatment of various illnesses. Their arguments are backed by statistics showing that 2% of the most acute hospital cases are responsible for 25% of the direct care costs. As a result, success in treating such potentially saves hospitals significant money in expenses. Additionally, empathetic and trust-based patient relationships allow the identification of hidden conditions whose treatment may prevent overt symptomatic problems that not only cause distress among patients but also strain healthcare providers’ capacity. This explanation is validated by the argument that empathy makes timely treatment possible, saving time and costs in prolonged care.
Scholarly studies offer different perspectives on the claim that empathy saves lives, time, and money. On the one hand, some argue that empathy and efficiency could be mutually exclusive or inversely related. On the other hand, some studies highlight the benefits of empathy in patient care. A survey by Kerasidou (2019) expresses that empathy and efficiency do not have a straightforward relationship, as demonstrated by previous events and studies. The explanation for this observation takes an economic perspective where hospitals seek to balance operational targets and financial outcomes. Empathy may require a caregiver to spend more time with a patient, which becomes more costly and time-consuming. On the contrary, caregivers who seek to be more efficient in terms of time-saving often prefer to handle a patient as quickly as possible, eliminating room for empathy. These arguments have been affirmed by the findings of the study by Kerasidou (2019), including that management tends to make most decisions regarding patient care and often calls for quick as opposed to empathetic care. In other words, doctors and nurses tend to come under pressure to process patients quickly instead of having an empathetic engagement with them.
The above study focuses more ...