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What do displays of empathy do in palliative care consultations?

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-03-20, 14:20 authored by Joseph Ford, Alexa Hepburn, Ruth Parry
Empathy is an important way for doctors to demonstrate their understanding of patients’ subjective experiences. This research considers the role of empathy in 37 doctor–patient palliative or end-of-life care consultations recorded in a hospice. Specifically, it focuses on four contexts in which there is a disparity between patients’ displayed experience of their illness and the doctor’s biomedical, expertise-driven perspective on their illness. These include cases in which the patient is sceptical of the medical perspective, cases in which the patient’s expectations exceed what can realistically be provided and cases in which patients have an overly pessimistic view of their condition. The analysis shows how doctors can use empathic statements to display that they are attentive to the patient’s subjective experience even when the task at hand is, ostensibly, an expertise-driven, biomedical one. It thus demonstrates that empathy is of importance throughout palliative care consultations, even in those phases which might seem biomedical or task-driven.

Funding

The data used in this research were collected by the ‘VERDIS’ programme of research and training funded by the Health Foundation Insight Award RU33. Joseph Ford was funded by a PhD studentship from Loughborough University. Some of Ruth Parry’s time working on this project was funded by a National Institute for Health Research Career Development Fellowship CDF-2014-07-046.

History

Published in

Discourse Studies

Volume

21

Issue

1

Pages

22 - 37

Citation

FORD, J., HEPBURN, A. and PARRY, R., 2019. What do displays of empathy do in palliative care consultations?. Discourse Studies, 21 (1), pp.22-37.

Publisher

SAGE Publications © The Author(s)

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2018-12-01

Publication date

2019-01-07

Notes

This paper was published in the journal Discourse Studies and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445618814030.

ISSN

1461-4456

eISSN

1461-7080

Language

  • en