Cultivating emergency physician behavioral empathy to improve emergency department care for pain and prescription opioid misuse

Abstract

Clinical empathy is the ability to understand the patient's experience, communicate that understanding, and act on it. There is evidence that patient and physician benefits are associated with more empathic communications. These include higher patient and physician satisfaction, improved quality of life, and decreased professional burnout for physicians, as well as increased patient compliance with care plans. Empathy appears to decline during medical school, residency training, and early professional emergency medicine practice; however, brief training has the potential to improve behavioral measures of empathy. Improvements in emergency department physician empathy seems especially important in managing patients at elevated risk for opioid-related harm. We describe our conceptual approach to identifying and designing a practice improvement curriculum aimed to cultivate and improve behavioral empathy among practicing emergency physicians. Emergent themes from our preliminary study of interviews, focus groups, and workshops were identified and analyzed for feasibility, sensitivity to change, and potential impact. A conceptual intervention will address the following key categories: patient stigmatization, identification of problematic pain-subtypes, empathic communication skills, interactions with family and friends, and techniques to manage inappropriate patient requests. The primary outcomes will be the changes in behavioral empathy associated with training. An assessment battery was chosen to measure physician psychosocial beliefs, attitudes and behavior, communication skills, and burnout magnitude. Additional outcomes will include opioid prescribing practice, naloxone prescribing, and referrals to addiction treatment. A pilot study will allow an estimation of the intervention impact to help finalize a curriculum suitable for web-based national implementation.