Research theme: Empathy and compassion
Empathy and Compassion is the first research theme at the Birgit Rausing Centre for Medical Humanities.
During 2021 and 2022, we’ve pursued the theme within a so called Advanced Study Group at the Pufendorf Institute at Lund University: "Enhancing empathy and compassion in healthcare students and professionals".
Website of the Pufendorf Institute at Lund University
The ability to express compassion increases the well-being of healthcare professionals and reduces the risk of burnout. Compassion in healthcare improves clinical outcomes for individual patients. Empathy for "the other" is also an important prerequisite for equal care. Our goal is to explore challenges associated with developing tools to increase empathy and compassion in health care and in professional education.
The research project Epione starts during 2023. The project strives to reach deeper understanding of the working conditions within Swedish healthcare and how job satisfaction correlate with self-care, empathy fatigue and secondary trauma.
Elinor Schad's blogpost about the Epione-project in our blog
In 2022, we arranged two interdisciplinary workshops: “How the other person's ethnicity affects your expression of empathy and compassion in healthcare and professional education”, and “Practices influencing empathy and compassion – contemplation, art, music, dance”.
The Pufendorf Institute's calendar on the workshop Practices influencing empathy and compassion
The conference The Neuroscience of Empathy and Compassion in May 2022 was an eye-opener for many of the participants, regardless of which faculty they came from.
In May 2023, we followed up with a related event, where neuroscientist and professor Anil Seth discussed the mysteries of human consciousness.
Contact
Åsa Thormählen
Coordinator
Asa [dot] Thormahlen [at] med [dot] lu [dot] se (Asa[dot]Thormahlen[at]med[dot]lu[dot]se)
