In recent approaches to ethics, the personal involvement of health care providers and their empathy are perceived as important elements of an overall ethical ability. Experiential working methods are used in ethics education to foster, inter alia, empathy. In 2008, the care-ethics lab ‘sTimul’ was founded in Flanders, Belgium, to provide training that focuses on improving care providers' ethical abilities through experiential working simulations. The curriculum of sTimul focuses on empathy sessions, aimed at care providers' empathic skills. The present study (...) provides better insight into how experiential learning specifically targets the empathic abilities of care providers. Providing contrasting experiences that affect the care providers' self-reflection seems a crucial element in this study. Further research is needed to provide more insight into how empathy leads to long-term changes in behaviour. (shrink)

In this paper, I will explore ideas advanced by Bradshaw, Pence and others who have written on compassion in healthcare. I will attempt to see how and whether their assumptions about compassion can be justified, and explore the role compassion should play in a modern healthcare system. I will justify scepticism at the idea of attempting to incentivise compassion through metrics. The Francis Report raises important questions concerning the nature of a healthcare system that harms rather than helps patients. If (...) something is failing in modern healthcare, those in charge should naturally seek to remedy it. I will investigate whether this is due to the disappearance of compassion, and if so, what is it that is emerging to fill its place. I will consider whether we need to rehabilitate or enforce compassion in the system, or to acknowledge that our modern healthcare systems are incompatible with compassion and how we can make the best of what remains. (shrink)

ChatGPT has taken the academic community by storm (Cotton, Cotton, and Shipway 2023; Cox and Tzoc 2023; Sullivan, Kelly, and McLaughlan 2023). Since its release in November 2022, chatGPT has predic...

A closer look at the lived illness experiences of medical professionals themselves shows that shared decision making is in need of a logic of care. This paper underlines that medical decision making inevitably takes place in a messy and uncertain context in which sharing responsibilities may impose a considerable burden on patients. A better understanding of patients’ lived experiences enables healthcare professionals to attune to what individual patients deem important in their lives. This will contribute to making medical decisions in (...) a good and caring manner, taking into account the lived experience of being ill. (shrink)

Studies have shown that students may feel emotional discomfort when they are asked to identify ethical problems which they have encountered during their training. Teachers in medical ethics, however, more often focus on the cognitive and rational ethical aspects and not much on students’ emotions. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore students’ feelings and emotions when dealing with ethical problems during their clinical training and explore differences between two countries: Indonesia and the Netherlands. We observed a total (...) of eighteen ethics group discussions and interviewed fifteen medical students at two medical schools. Data were interpreted and analyzed using content analysis. We categorized students’ negative emotions based on their objects of reflection and came up with three categories: emotions concerning their own performance, emotions when witnessing unethical behaviors, and emotions related to barriers and limitations of their working environment. Our study suggests that addressing emotional responses in a culturally sensitive way is important to develop students’ self-awareness. Teachers should be able to guide students to reflect on and be critical of their own thoughts and emotions, to understand their own moral values, especially when confronted with other individuals. (shrink)

Studies have shown that students may feel emotional discomfort when they are asked to identify ethical problems which they have encountered during their training. Teachers in medical ethics, however, more often focus on the cognitive and rational ethical aspects and not much on students’ emotions. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore students’ feelings and emotions when dealing with ethical problems during their clinical training and explore differences between two countries: Indonesia and the Netherlands. We observed a total (...) of eighteen ethics group discussions and interviewed fifteen medical students at two medical schools. Data were interpreted and analyzed using content analysis. We categorized students’ negative emotions based on their objects of reflection and came up with three categories: emotions concerning their own performance, emotions when witnessing unethical behaviors, and emotions related to barriers and limitations of their working environment. Our study suggests that addressing emotional responses in a culturally sensitive way is important to develop students’ self-awareness. Teachers should be able to guide students to reflect on and be critical of their own thoughts and emotions, to understand their own moral values, especially when confronted with other individuals. (shrink)

This article reports on moral problems that were raised by medical students as the basis for an ethical case-conference in an obstetrics and gynaecology clerkship. After introducing the issue of teaching clinical ethics, the method of our case-conference is explained. Next, the variety of topics and related moral problems are presented. The article continues with a discussion of three distinct and challenging aspects that characterise obstetrics and gynaecology as a domain for teaching clinical ethics. The conclusion puts forward three significant (...) points our review raises. (shrink)

Professional medical ethics demands of health care professionals in addition to specific duties and rules of conduct that they embody a responsible and trustworthy personality. In the public discussion, different concepts are suggested to describe the desired implied attitude of physicians. In a sequel of three articles, a set of three of these concepts is presented in an interpretation that is meant to characterise the morally emotional part of this attitude: “empathy”, “compassion” and “care”. In the first article of the (...) series, “empathy” has been developed as a mainly cognitive and morally neutral capacity of understanding. In this article, the emotional and virtuous core of the desired professional attitude—compassion—is elaborated. Compassion is distinguished from sympathy, empathy and pity. Several problems of compassion as a spontaneous, warm emotion for being a professional virtue are discussed: especially questions of over-demand, of justice and of concerns because of a possible threat to the patient’s dignity and autonomy. An interpretation of compassion as processed and learned professional attitude, that founds dignity on the general idea of man as a sentient being and on solidarity, not on his independence and capacities, is developed. It is meant to rule out the possible side effects and to make compassion as a professional attitude and as professional virtue attractive, teachable and acquirable. In order to reach the adequate warmth and closeness for the particular physician-patient-relation, professional compassion has to be combined with the capacity of empathy. If appropriate, the combination of both empathy and compassion as “empathic compassion” can demand a much warmer attitude towards the patient than each of the elements alone, or the simple addition of them can provide. The concept of “care” that will be discussed in a forthcoming article of this sequel is a missing necessary part to describe the active potential of the desired moral attitude of the physician more completely. The reconstruction of the desired professional attitude in terms of “empathic compassionate care” is certainly not the only possible description, but it is a detailed proposal in order to give an impulse for the discussion about the inner tacit values and the meaning of medicine and clinical healthcare professions. (shrink)

Medicine has made great strides with advances in technology and outcomes. However, compassion is an element that often is missing from medical care and ethics. The paper discusses why compassion is the ideal physician and why it is important to medicine. The benefit of compassion in biomedical ethics by exploring three ethical frameworks is also explored. Compassion is an important concept that has a place in both medical care and ethical practice.

‘Doing good medical ethics’ involves attending to both the biomedical and existential aspects of illness. For this, we need to bring in a phenomenological perspective to the clinical encounter, adopt a virtue-based ethic and resolve to re-evaluate the goals of medicine, in particular the alleviation of suffering and the role of compassion in everyday ethics.

This article discusses the challenging context that health care professionals are confronted with, and the impact of this context on their emotional experiences. Care ethics considers emotions as a valuable source of knowledge for good care. Thinking with care ethical theory and looking through a care ethical lens at a practical case example, the authors discern reflective questions that shed light on a care ethical approach toward the role of emotions in care practices, and may be used by practitioners and (...) facilitators for care ethical reflection on similar cases, in the particular and concrete context where issues around emotional experiences arise. The authors emphasize the importance of allowing emotions to exist, to acknowledge them and to not repress them, so that they can serve as a vehicle for ethical behavior in care practices. They stress the difference between acknowledging emotions and expressing them limitlessly. Formational practices and transformational research practices are being proposed to create moral space in care institutions and to support health care professionals to approach the emotionally turbulent practices they encounter in a way that contributes to good care for all those involved. (shrink)