New technologies are transforming healthcare work and changing how patients interact with healthcare providers. As artificial intelligence systems, robotics, and data analytics become more sophisticated, some clinical tasks will become obsolete and others will be reconfigured. While it is not possible to predict these developments precisely, it is important to understand their inevitability and to prepare for the changes that lie ahead. Without Compassion, There Is No Healthcare argues that compassion must be upheld as the bedrock and guiding purpose of healthcare work. Emerging technologies have the potential to subvert this purpose but also to enable and expand it, creating new conduits for compassionate care. Cultivating these benefits and guarding against potential threats will require vigilance and determination from healthcare providers, educators, leaders, patients, and advocates. The contributors to this book show the way forward, bringing a diverse range of expertise to confront these challenges. Avoiding platitudes and simple dichotomies, they examine what compassion in healthcare means and how it can be practised, now and in the uncertain future. Without Compassion, There Is No Healthcare is a call to action. Drawing together a decade of evidence and insight generated by a community of leading scholars and practitioners committed to promoting compassionate care, it offers steady principles and practices to steer the way through times of technological change.

"In Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring Makes a Difference, physician scientists Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli uncover the eye-opening data that compassion could be a wonder drug for the 21st century. Now, for the first time ever, a rigorous review of the science - coupled with captivating stories from the front lines of medicine - demonstrates that human connection in health care matters in astonishing ways. Never before has all the evidence been synthesized together in one place."--Amazon.

With chapters revolving around practical issues and real-world contexts, this Handbook offers much-needed insights into the ethics of primary healthcare. An international set of contributors from a broad range of areas in ethics and practice address a challenging array of topics. These range from the issues arising in primary care interactions, to working with different sources of vulnerability among patients, from contexts connected with teaching and learning, to issues in relation to justice and resources. The book is both interdisciplinary and inter-professional, including not just ‘standard’ philosophical clinical ethics but also approaches using the humanities, clinical empirical research, management theory and much else besides. This practical handbook will be an invaluable resource for anyone who is seeking a better appreciation and understanding of the ethics ‘in’, ‘of’ and ‘for’ primary healthcare. That includes clinicians and commissioners, but also policymakers and academics concerned with primary care ethics. Readers are encouraged to explore and critique the ideas discussed in the 44 chapters; whether or not readers agree with all the authors’ views, this volume aims to inform, educate and, in many cases, inspire. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

The best strategies in healthcare begin with empathy Revolutionary advances in medical knowledge have caused doctors to become so focused on their narrow fields of expertise that they often overlook the simplest fact of all: their patients are suffering. This suffering goes beyond physical pain. It includes the fear, uncertainty, anxiety, confusion, mistrust, and waiting that so often characterize modern healthcare. One of healthcare’s most acclaimed thought leaders, Dr. Thomas H. Lee shows that world-class medical treatment and compassionate care are not mutually exclusive. In An Epidemic of Empathy in Healthcare, he argues that we must have it both ways—that combining advanced science with empathic care is the only way to build the health systems our society needs and deserves. Organizing providers so that care is compassionate and coordinated is not only the right thing to do for patients, it also forms the core of strategy in healthcare’s competitive new marketplace. It provides business advantages to organizations that strive to reduce human suffering effectively, reliably, and efficiently. Lee explains how to develop a culture that treats the patient, not the malady, and he provides step-by-step guidance for unleashing an “epidemic of empathy” by: Developing a shared understanding of the overarching goal—meeting patients’ needs and reducing their suffering Making empathic care a social norm rather than the focus of economic incentives Pinpointing and addressing the most significant causes of patient suffering Collecting and using data to drive improvement Healthcare is entering a new era driven by competition on value—meeting patients’ needs as efficiently as possible. Leaders must make the choice either to move forward and build a new culture designed for twenty-first-century medicine or to maintain old models and practices and be left behind. Lee argues that empathic care resonates with the noblest values of all clinicians. If healthcare organizations can help caregivers live up to these values and focus on alleviating their patients’ suffering, they hold the key to improving value-based care and driving business success. Join the compassionate care movement and unleash an epidemic of empathy! Thomas H. Lee, MD, is Chief Medical Officer of Press Ganey, with more than three decades of experience in healthcare performance improvement as a practicing physician, leader in provider organizations, researcher, and health policy expert. He is a Professor (Part-time) of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Pastoral Virtues for Artificial Intelligence (AI) acknowledges that human destiny is intimately tied to artificial intelligence. AI already outperforms a person on most tasks. Our ever-deepening relationship with an AI that is increasingly autonomous mirrors our relationship to what is perceived as Sacred or Divine. Like God, AI awakens hope and fear in people, while giving life to some and taking livelihood, especially in the form of jobs, from others. AI, built around values of convenience, productivity, speed, efficiency, and cost reduction, serve humanity poorly, especially in moments that demand care and wisdom. This book explores the pastoral virtues of hope, patience, play, wisdom, and compassion as foundational to personal flourishing, communal thriving, and building a robust AI. Biases of determinism, speed, objectivity, ignorance, and apathy within AI's algorithms are identified. These biases can be minimized through the incorporation of pastoral virtues as values guiding AI.

The Patient-Centered Clinical Method (PCCM) has been a core tenet of the practice and teaching of medicine since the first edition of Patient-Centered Medicine - Transforming the Clinical Method was published in 1995. This timely fourth edition continues to define the principles underpinning the patient-centered clinical method using four major components, clarifying its evolution and consequent development, and it brings the reader fully up to date. It reinforces the relevance of the method in the current much-changed realities of health care in a world where virtual care will remain common, dependence on technology is rising, and societal changes away from compassion, equity, and relationships toward confrontation, inequity, and self-absorption. Fully revised by its highly experienced author team ensuring wide interest and written for those practising now and for the practitioners of the future, this new edition will be welcomed by a wide international audience comprising all health professionals from medicine, nursing, social work, occupational therapy, physical therapy, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, and other fields.

Brian Boyle tells a personal story of his fight back from near death after a horrific automobile accident. He focuses on his experience as a patient who, while in a two-month long medically induced coma, was unable to move or talk to anyone around him, yet he was able to hear, see and feel pain. Brian slowly clawed his way back to the living and found the strength to live to tell his story in his acclaimed memoir, Iron Heart. Now Brian provides vital information from the patient’s perspective to help caregivers gain valuable insight that will help them understand new ways on how to provide care to both patients and their families. By completion of this book, the participant will be able to: Recognize the variety of feelings and emotions of the patient Identify simple methods and interventions to provide emotional support to relax the patient Determine the importance of particular amenities to a patient who may be unable to communicate Evaluate patient life-history to determine appropriate intervention techniques Understand the motivational role that communication has between the healthcare provider and the patient and his or her family Brian’s story about catastrophe, survival, and transcending all odds has implemented new and innovative strategies for improving patient safety and quality of care on a national level, as well as serving as a learning experience for healthcare providers of all levels and backgrounds. When it comes to the patient experience, Brian has become a mouthpiece for the voiceless.

This book focuses on the critical area of delivering mental health services in rural settings. It is designed as a practical guide to the technological provision of timely, effective, evidence-based care, helpful to the novice and the experienced practitioner alike. The benefits of this approach are: Improved access to and improved quality of care Technical support for providers and administrators A means of providing missing specialty care An ability to maximize scarce resources and significant flexibility for health service delivery. The book will cover how to adjust therapeutic skills to patients’ needs, models of care and the particular technology used. It shows how rudimentary design of workflow can assist in integrating care, and highlights the importance of allowing for cultural needs (both rural geography and ethnic/race). Administrative issues are also addressed (e.g., privacy, reimbursement). The chapters are short and designed for maximum practicality, including learning objectives, cases and summaries emphasizing “what to do and how to do it.”

Health care regulatory agencies demand that patients receive efficient, competent, compassionate care; however, because of caregivers' own unhealed issues along with other factors, care often falls short of those goals. Melanie Sears, RN, MBA, PhD, leverages more than thirty years of nursing experience to look at what really prevents patients from getting the care they need and health care workers from getting the support needed to thrive in the stressful environment of health care. From domination-style management, fear and judgment-based practitioner relationships, and a poignant separation between physical, mental, and emotional care, the costs of these factors are enormous. Sears argues that the most effective way to evolve this problematic culture is to shift the language used by those providing care.

Physicians recognize the importance of patients' emotions in healing yet believe their own emotional responses represent lapses in objectivity. Patients complain that physicians are too detached. Halpern argues that by empathizing with patients, rather than detaching, physicians can best help them. Yet there is no consistent view of what, precisely, clinical empathy involves. This book challenges the traditional assumption that empathy is either purely intellectual or an expression of sympathy. Sympathy, according to many physicians, involves over-identifying with patients, threatening objectivity and respect for patient autonomy. How can doctors use empathy in diagnosing and treating patients rithout jeopardizing objectivity or projecting their values onto patients? Jodi Halpern, a psychiatrist, medical ethicist and philosopher, develops a groundbreaking account of emotional reasoning as the core of clinical empathy. She argues that empathy cannot be based on detached reasoning because it involves emotional skills, including associating with another person's images and spontaneously following another's mood shifts. Yet she argues that these emotional links need not lead to over-identifying with patients or other lapses in rationality but rather can inform medical judgement in ways that detached reasoning cannot. For reflective physicians and discerning patients, this book provides a road map for cultivating empathy in medical practice. For a more general audience, it addresses a basic human question: how can one person's emotions lead to an understanding of how another person is feeling?