Compassion in health care seems like it should be a given. Doctors enter the demanding field of medicine because they want to help people, and patients want physicians who care deeply about their well-being. So why is there a crisis of compassion in the sector today? Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli, two physician scientists at Cooper University Health Care in New Jersey, examine that topic in their new book, Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence That Caring Makes a Difference. Relying on evidence gathered from hundreds of studies, the authors make the case for why compassion leads to better outcomes for patients and lower rates of burnout for practitioners. Trzeciak, who is chief of medicine at Cooper as well as chair of medicine at Cooper Medical School at Rowan University, joined the Knowledge@Wharton radio show on SiriusXM to talk about bringing more compassion into the practice of medicine. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)
An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
How do you define compassion?
KHow do you define compassio
Stephen Trzeciak: Nomenclature is important in any scientific discipline, and compassionomics is no different. Researchers define compassion as an emotional response to another’s pain or suffering involving an authentic desire to help. It’s slightly different from a very closely related term of empathy. Empathy is the feeling, understanding or detecting of another’s emotions and resonating with that. Compassion takes it one step further and means taking action to help alleviate that to some extent.
Knowledge@Wharton: I’ve seen reports that say doctors often don’t feel like they have the time to provide empathy. How much does that factor into this issue?
Trzeciak: Empathy is vital because if you don’t detect or understand another’s emotional state, you’re not going to be inclined to take action with compassion to help alleviate it. A study from 2012 published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that 56% of physicians said they don’t have time for compassion. That was a piece of data among many that indicated to Anthony Mazzarelli and I that there is, in fact, a compassion crisis in health care. You may say we have a compassion crisis in society at large, and that’s a topic for a different day. I’m going to stay in my lane as a physician scientist and just speak to the effects of compassion.
If you don’t detect or understand another’s emotional state, you’re not going to be inclined to take action with compassion to help alleviate it.”
There is abundant data in the medical literature showing that we have a compassion crisis in health care. Survey data shows that nearly half of Americans believe that the U.S. health care system is not compassionate. Nearly half of Americans believe that health care providers are not compassionate. This is coupled with evidence that physicians, specifically, miss 60% to 90% of opportunities to respond to patients with compassion. And more survey data shows that two-thirds of Americans have had a meaningful health care experience with a striking lack of compassion.
This is coupled now in the era of electronic health records, where there are rigorous data to show that health care providers spend more time looking into computer screens than looking their patients in the eyes. Based on all of these data, we conclude that we have a compassion crisis. But the next question is, does it matter? Does compassion really matter?
Knowledge@Wharton: I would think a lot of people would say it is a huge component not only in terms of the relationship between patient and doctor, but also in the success of the organization as well. Would you agree?
Trzeciak: Absolutely. The vast majority of health care providers, I’d say 99.9%, believe that compassion is vital to health care, in one sense — as an “ought.” We ought to treat people with compassion. In Compassionomics, we did a two-year journey through the biomedical evidence not only to test whether or not compassion mattered in a moral or ethical, or emotional or sentimental sense, but does it actually matter in a scientific sense? Is there scientific evidence that caring makes a difference for patients, for patient care and for the health care providers themselves?
That’s to your point about organizations. It is absolutely vital that we have compassion in health care because there is striking evidence in the literature that more compassion is associated with lower burnout. Therefore, compassion on the part of health care providers isn’t just good for the receiver of compassion, it’s actually good for the giver, too…..(Readmore)