Hospitals in England ranking highly for empathy ‘have better patient outcomes’ | Health
Research shows that patients and staff fare better in hospitals that rank highly in terms of empathy, and institutions also benefit financially by spending less on staff, representatives and consultants.
The finding comes from the first study to rate NHS trusts in England on an empathy score derived from information about the organisation’s culture, leadership behavior and practitioner empathy, among other factors.
The report found that even modest increases in a trust’s overall empathy score were associated with widespread benefits, such as an increased chance of the trust having a “good” or “outstanding” rating for effectiveness and patient safety by the Care Quality Commission, the health and social care services regulator.
Small improvements in empathy were also linked to better staff well-being; higher-scoring trusts reported less burnout and absenteeism than lower-scoring trusts. The researchers found that spending on agency staff and external consultants was also lower in trusts with higher levels of empathy.
“More empathetic organizations have better patient outcomes, staff wellbeing and financial outcomes,” said the study’s lead author, Professor Jeremy Howick from the University of Leicester. “Empathy helps patients because they feel like they are being listened to. If you don’t listen to the patient or they can’t share all of their symptoms, you can’t understand what they’re going through and you can’t make an accurate diagnosis.”
The investigation comes just days after the BBC revealed details of the brutal treatment of women in the maternity unit run by the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS trust, which is the focus of the largest maternity investigation in NHS history.
It was revealed that senior midwives advised others not to be “too gentle”, while one patient was so discouraged from coming to hospital that her baby died on arrival. On the whiteboard in the unit, the letters “FOH,” an acronym for “get the hell out of the house,” appeared next to the names of several heavily pregnant women.
“There is a problem with a lack of empathy that leads to preventable harm,” Howick said. “I don’t want to generalize, but there is a problem and it needs to be improved.”
Howick and colleagues used publicly available data such as CQC ratings, NHS staff surveys and financial accounts to rank trusts across nine different areas of empathy. For example, staff surveys provided information on whether trusts have a culture of empathy and whether staff feel recognized and rewarded.
The average NHS trust empathy score was six on a scale of 1 to 10. The researchers found that for every 2.5% increase, the CQC saw a 76% greater chance of rating the trust as good or excellent for patient safety, and a 46% increase in the rate of being rated as good or excellent for effectiveness. Trusts that scored highest for empathy spent hundreds of thousands of pounds less on agency staff and consultants.
The research has been submitted to BMC Health Services Research, but the results are provisional as the study has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Although the study establishes a link between empathy, patient care and staff well-being, it cannot prove that increasing empathy provides benefits. Patients and staff are likely to perform better in well-managed trusts, where empathy has a greater chance of developing.
But Howick believes there are good reasons to think empathy is helpful. previous research It has been shown that empathy can reduce pain, depression and anxiety, and increase patient satisfaction and quality of life. “Our study doesn’t establish causality, but if you look at the evidence from the round, it’s reasonable to argue that it is causal,” he said.
Although the survey does not list the worst performers, the top trusts for empathy include Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS trust, Pennine Care NHS trust and Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS trust.
Prof Jeffrey Braithwaite, who studies health systems at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, said increasing empathy could improve patient outcomes and did not have many downsides. “The danger is that empathy becomes just another slogan on a poster or another online training module,” he said. “The real gains will come when the NHS trusts in the redesign of clinical work. This means staffing, workload, teamwork, psychological safety and responsiveness to patients. Doesn’t this make empathy more likely rather than just hoping?”
