Teaching empathy and compassion to healthcare providers in palliative care: a scoping review

Rao, Seema Rajesh, Sherigar, Mithili Narayan, Norman, Michelle and Joshi, Udita 2024. Teaching empathy and compassion to healthcare providers in palliative care: a scoping review. ecancermedicalscience 18 , 1817. 10.3332/ecancer.2024.1817

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Abstract

Empathy and compassion are core competencies that healthcare providers (HCPs) require when caring for patients and families with life-threatening illnesses like cancer. These constructs are often challenging to define and generalise and are often used interchangeably. Medical education has evolved from the traditional curriculum-based approach to a more eclectic competency-based approach. The purpose of this review is to explore the current evidence on teaching compassionate care for palliative care issues in cancer settings in lower-middle-income countries. A preliminary search of the Scopus database from 2,000 until now identified 1,502 records, of which 54 peer-reviewed articles were included in this review. Training in compassion and empathy was delivered in three formats: online, face-to-face and blended learning or hybrid. The training modalities were didactic, experiential and reflective, with many educational interventions using a multimodal approach. The educational interventions reported a positive outcome and improvement in empathetic and compassionate behaviours. However, they were limited due to inadequately defined constructs, use of self-reported outcome measures and difficulty in ascertaining if these skills were retained long-term and were translated into the clinical settings. Given that compassion and empathy are multidimensional constructs, it is imperative that educational interventions be multimodal and learner-centred, focusing on developing the knowledge, attitudes, skills and behaviours of the HCP in providing compassionate care while aiming for conceptual clarity regarding definition and more robust validated outcome measures.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Medicine
Publisher:	ecancer Global Foundation
ISSN:	1754-6605
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	24 March 2025
Date of Acceptance:	13 November 2024
Last Modified:	25 Mar 2025 12:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/177117

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