What Is Clinical Empathy in Anesthesiology? Perspectives From Practicing Anesthesiologists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: 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. METHODS: 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. RESULTS: 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. CONCLUSIONS: 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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".