Compassionate Care to Improve Patient Outcomes and Your Career

Speaker Bio

Dr. Anton Helman is an Emergency Physician at North York General in Toronto. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, Division of Emergency Medicine and the Education Innovation Lead at the Schwartz-Reisman Emergency Medicine Institute. He is the founder, host and chief editor of Emergency Medicine Cases.

Take home points on compassionate care

  • As a profession, we suck at compassion as it is trained out of us through medical school and beyond
  • Compassion in not simply innate; like any behaviour, it can be learned through deliberate practice
  • There is evidence that compassion may improve morbidity and/or mortality in patients after trauma, cardiac events, cancer, diabetes, back pain, migraine headache and other conditions
  • There is evidence that compassion may prevent physician burnout and reduces rates of medical error
  • There is evidence that compassion may reduce the rates of patient complaints and litigation
  • There is evidence that compassion may improve physician efficiency and resource utilization by reducing non-essential test ordering
  • A cultural shift emphasizing the importance of compassion in patient care needs to occur to improve outcomes of our patients and our job satisfaction; as such, compassion should be part of our training and CME

Deeper dive into compassionate care in Emergency Medicine with the late Dr. Barbara Tatham Episode 145 Physician Compassion – The Barbara Tatham Memorial Podcast

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