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Topics: Health Care, Health Service

  • An empathetic approach in healthcare is important, but sometimes challenging to achieve in practice. Photo: Johnér bildbyrå AB

    Doctors struggle with empathy in a high-pressure work environment

    Empathy is often seen as a natural and essential part of the patient encounter – but reality tends to look quite different. In a new doctoral thesis from Umeå University, doctors describe how not only time pressure, but also the structure of medical education and the culture of the workplace, can make it difficult to live up to the ideal.