What Is Clinical Empathy in Anesthesiology? Perspectives From Practicing Anesthesiologists

To train and encourage providers to be more empathic, it is crucial to first understand what behaviors providers consider acts of empathy in clinical practice. Research has asked this important question of patients and certain physician specialties, but has left out a unique physician population-anesthesiologists. Given the link between patients' preoperative anxiety and poorer postoperative outcomes, anesthesiologists' ability to address patients' needs effectively, particularly during shorter interactions with new patients, may impact patient outcomes. The purpose of the current research was to investigate what anesthesiologists consider to be empathic behaviors and to compare these results with past investigations of other physician specialties.

Practicing anesthesiologists (N = 99) were recruited online to rate 49 physician behaviors on a 0 to 10 scale for the degree to which each behavior was aligned with their own conceptualization of clinical empathy.

Three components of empathic behaviors emerged: Conscientious and Reassuring, Relationship Oriented, and Emotionally Involved. In line with past work with other physician specialties, anesthesiologists rated Relationship-Oriented behaviors as those most closely related and Conscientious and Reassuring behaviors as least closely related to what they viewed as empathy. Although not statistically significantly, men anesthesiologists were more likely to view Conscientious and Reassuring behaviors as aligned with their conceptualizations of empathy than women anesthesiologists, and women anesthesiologists were significantly more likely to view Emotionally Involved behaviors as aligned with their conceptualizations of empathy than men anesthesiologists, with medium effect sizes.

Although anesthesiologists interact with patients during some of the most emotionally charged and vulnerable situations when evaluating, monitoring, and supervising patient care, beginning preoperatively and continuing through their postoperative care, they do not view empathy behaviors fundamentally differently than other physician specialties. We discuss how these results can inform medical education communication and relational approaches by capitalizing on the understanding of anesthesiologists' conceptualizations of empathy.