Teaching empathy and compassion to healthcare providers in palliative care: a scoping review

Empathy and compassion are core competencies that healthcare providers (HCPs) require when caring for patients and families with life-threatening illnesses like cancer. These constructs are often challenging to define and generalise and are often used interchangeably. Medical education has evolved from the traditional curriculum-based approach to a more eclectic competency-based approach. The purpose of this review is to explore the current evidence on teaching compassionate care for palliative care issues in cancer settings in lower-middle-income countries. A preliminary search of the Scopus database from 2,000 until now identified 1,502 records, of which 54 peer-reviewed articles were included in this review. Training in compassion and empathy was delivered in three formats: online, face-to-face and blended learning or hybrid. The training modalities were didactic, experiential and reflective, with many educational interventions using a multimodal approach. The educational interventions reported a positive outcome and improvement in empathetic and compassionate behaviours. However, they were limited due to inadequately defined constructs, use of self-reported outcome measures and difficulty in ascertaining if these skills were retained long-term and were translated into the clinical settings. Given that compassion and empathy are multidimensional constructs, it is imperative that educational interventions be multimodal and learner-centred, focusing on developing the knowledge, attitudes, skills and behaviours of the HCP in providing compassionate care while aiming for conceptual clarity regarding definition and more robust validated outcome measures.