Why Should We Teach Empathic Communication Skills to Medical Students?
Empathy in healthcare isn’t just about being kind — it’s a powerful clinical skill. When doctors and other healthcare professionals communicate with empathy, research shows that patients do better: they report less pain, recover more quickly, and feel more satisfied with their care (Howick et al., 2018, Keshtkar et al., 2024). But despite all the evidence in its favour, empathy often fades during medical school (Andersen et al., 2020).
One possible reason is how communication skills are traditionally taught — in short, standalone sessions, often focused on learning frameworks or stock phrases like “acknowledge emotion” or “summarise concerns.” Without reinforcement or real-world application, these risk becoming formulaic. Add to this the hidden curriculum — the subtle but powerful messages students absorb on the wards — and the problem deepens. In busy clinical environments, empathy can seem less valued than speed or efficiency. The result? Students start to treat empathic communication as a box-ticking task: saying things like “I’m sorry to hear that” — not because they genuinely feel it, but because they’ve been told that’s what empathy is supposed to sound like, and that it will earn them a mark in the OSCE.
When doctors and other healthcare professionals communicate with empathy, research shows that patients do better: they report less pain, recover more quickly, and feel more satisfied with their care.
At Leicester Medical School, we’ve adopted a different approach specifically to tackle these issues. Recognising that short, isolated teaching sessions and hidden messages can undermine empathy, we’ve developed a curriculum that embeds empathic communication throughout all five years of medical training (Ward et al., 2025). Co-produced with students, educators, and patients, this longitudinal approach integrates empathy-focused teaching into every stage of the course — from early patient contact in the first year to complex consultations in the final year. A key feature is a series of home visits where students are not asked to take a medical history or make a diagnosis, but simply to talk with patients about their lives and their experiences of healthcare. This creates space for genuine connection, curiosity, and listening — the foundations of empathy. Alongside this, students are introduced to evidence-based techniques like the BATHE model (McCulloch et al., 1998), and receive feedback directly from patients using tools like the CARE Measure (Mercer et al., 2004). Empathy isn’t treated as a standalone skill or a checklist — it’s woven into every part of the curriculum and reinforced through reflection, real-world application, and patient partnerships.
So why teach empathic communication skills? Because they’re good for patients, good for doctors, and essential to the kind of healthcare we all want to see.
The Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare delivers professional training workshops for healthcare practitioners and educators. For more details of all our forthcoming events, please visit https://le.ac.uk/empathy/study
Further Reading
Empathy-Based Healthcare Education: How to teach empathy – A Handbook – This handbook presents a comprehensive, evidence-based approach to reversing the decline in medical student empathy, developed by the Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare at Leicester Medical School.
References
Andersen, F. A., Johansen, A.-S. B., Søndergaard, J., Andersen, C. M., & Assing Hvidt, E. (2020). Revisiting the trajectory of medical students’ empathy, and impact of gender, specialty preferences and nationality: A systematic review. BMC Medical Education, 20(1), 18. https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-020-1964-5
Howick, J., Moscrop, A., Mebius, A., Fanshawe, T. R., Lewith, G., Bishop, F. L., Mistiaen, P., Roberts, N. W., Dieninyte, E., & Hu, X.-Y. (2018). Effects of empathic and positive communication in healthcare consultations: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 111(7), 240–252. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6047264/
Keshtkar, L., Madigan, C. D., Ward, A., Ahmed, S., Tanna, V., Rahman, I., Bostock, J., Nockels, K., Wang, W., & Gillies, C. L. (2024). The effect of practitioner empathy on patient satisfaction: A systematic review of randomized trials. Annals of Internal Medicine, 177(3), 196–209. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38285985/
McCulloch, J., Ramesar, S., & Peterson, H. (1998). Psychotherapy in primary care: The BATHE technique. American Family Physician, 57(9), 2131–2134. https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/1998/0501/p2131.html
Mercer, S. W., Maxwell, M., Heaney, D., & Watt, G. C. (2004). The consultation and relational empathy (CARE) measure: Development and preliminary validation and reliability of an empathy-based consultation process measure. Family Practice, 21(6), 699–705. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15528286/
Ward, A., Gilligan, C., Bennett-Weston, A., & Howick, J. (2025). The development, delivery, and evaluation of novel longitudinal empathy-focused communication skills training at a UK medical school. PEC Innovation, 100436. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pecinn.2025.100436
Dr Andy Ward is a member of the UKCCC and an Associate Professor of Medical Education and Honorary Senior Academic GP at the University of Leicester and its pioneering Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare.
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