Empathy is the ability to step into someone’s shoes and feel the emotions that they feel. It is often confused with sympathy, which is the act of pitying someone for their misfortune. As a future healthcare professional, you are required to empathise with your patients rather than sympathise with them.
Sympathy suggests compassion and pity towards the suffering of another but doesn’t include being able to feel like the other person. Sympathy, in the context of medicine, can make a patient feel pitied as opposed to fully understood and so this can make the doctor-patient relationship more one-sided. For this reason, empathy is more valuable in medicine and is essential for doctors in getting the best outcome for their patients. A patient that feels connected to the doctor is more likely to reveal information that is key to the diagnosis and treatment.
Empathy is a topic that interviewers will often ask you to discuss and elaborate on. You could be asked something similar to the following questions:
- What is the importance of a doctor being empathetic towards their patients?
- Why should medical professionals be able to show empathy towards their colleagues and towards their patients?
- In medicine, is empathy more important or sympathy, and why?
- How would you show empathy to a patient? Give an example from your work experience.
In your response to the above questions, make sure you structure your answer well; start off by defining what empathy means to you and then develop this by explaining its meaning in the healthcare profession. Make sure to distinguish between empathy and sympathy – even if it wasn’t asked in the question. Give a specific example of when you have witnessed or displayed empathy during your work experience or even during your volunteer work. Then move on to unfold the reason why empathy is such a significant ability to possess in the field of medicine. Your response could end with a conclusive statement about the overall benefits of being empathetic.
Empathy is an individual’s ability to step into a third person’s shoes and be able to view things from their perspective. It allows people to feel the emotions that somebody goes through in a particular situation. The ability to empathise differs from one’s ability to sympathise. Empathy involves a deeper understanding of someone’s emotions whereas sympathy is simply the act of acknowledging their feelings and is somewhat restricted to feelings of pity. During my work experience of shadowing a general practitioner, I learnt that a patient doesn’t only present their physical illness to a doctor. There is often an underlying mental struggle that is a part of their illness, which can be treated by a doctor. The GP I shadowed had explained the importance of empathising with her patients; it allowed her to understand their struggles and helped her approach the situation in a better way. Empathy allows a doctor to develop their patient communication skills because they would be seeing the situation through a patient’s eyes. Their approach changes and the way they communicate with the patient also changes. Overall, being empathetic builds up a better rapport that is beneficial to the doctor-patient relationship.
Motivation to pursue medicine is another topic that is commonly asked about in the interview. Interviewers want to see a passion and a reason for your motivation to become a doctor. The most obvious question for an interviewer to ask is ‘What is your motivation to become a doctor?’. The best way to answer this question is to be honest and speak about the real reason you decided to pursue this career. Go through your thought process and explain in detail the steps you have taken to get to where you are. Through your experience of shadowing, volunteering, and exploring medicine, describe what being a medical student means to you. Try not to sound too in awe of the medical profession; sometimes an interviewer appreciates students who are aware of the negatives of being a doctor.
In a nutshell, empathy is the intellectual comprehension of another person’s plight, viewing things from their perspective, and being able to share the same feelings as if you were experiencing it yourself. Motivation, in reference to universities, is the ability to explain why you have chosen the path of medicine and why you plan to stick with your choice. All in all, it’s important to make sure you know how empathy and motivation can be asked about in the interview.