The Role of Empathy in Jordanian Medical Encounters

ABSTRACT

Patients’ satisfaction with their clinical visits is a common indicator of the latter’s success. Their satisfaction is then reflected in the outcomes of the visit as satisfied patients are more likely to accept their doctor’s diagnosis, treatment suggestions, and advice, as well as trust their future arrangements. In addition, this satisfaction then provides doctors with insight into the effectiveness of empathizing with patients and in terms of dealing with them as humans rather than as an illness. Therefore, this study investigated the role of empathy in Jordanian clinical encounters. A conversation analysis approach was conducted to reveal the types and functional accomplishments of empathy. The findings reveal three types of empathy: acknowledgment, pursuit, and sharing experiences and feelings. This study also found that empathy contributes to the success of medical visits as it plays a helpful role in these medical encounters, such as motivating patients to take care of their health, allowing the doctor to claim knowledge of the patient’s problem, and allowing the sharing of strong feelings. Moreover, the empathy sequences then lead into the suggestion sequences, which are likely to improve patients’ satisfaction. These findings provide insight into the usefulness of deploying empathy in clinical visits, which can be boosted by designing training courses that aim to help raise doctors’ awareness of the value of empathy in medical encounters.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Teri Thompson, the editor of Health Communication, for her belief in the idea of my study and her continuous support. A debt of gratitude is also owed to Taylor and Francis in general and Ginny Herbert in particular for their encouragement and financial support for editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.