This post is about conflict management, personal safety, and Dynamis training. Empathy in Conflict Resolution is so important that we wanted healthcare teams to have an opportunity to explore their relationship with empathic listening and communication.
One of the issues we know about in the emergency department is that, in order to operate functionally and be efficient, staff have to be able to switch off parts of their empathic or emotional selves and not be emotionally affected by the difficult or distressing things that are often going on in their work.
They may see trauma. They may see family dramas playing out. They may see children hurt. They may see older people drawing close to death, and many other troubling scenarios. Over time they will start to naturally disassociate from their not-unnatural emotional responses. They disengage from empathy.
💡 The paradox of empathy: This puts our ED teams at risk of creating a hard outer shell — an unemotional and dispassionate perimeter — through which the real needs of patients and visitors may not be able to penetrate. Staff may appear cold, uncaring, unkind, ungenerous, dispassionate — giving a perception that they are not really concerned about their patients or visitors.
Survivors of acute trauma remember a lack of compassion from their caregivers. This TED Talk captures the point:
“It’s Their First Time” — Switching on Empathy in Conflict Resolution
It was important to us that we create some empathy practice activities in our conflict resolution training that would stimulate the staff to think about their ability to be open to the experiences of others, and to look at the visit to the emergency department in a different way — to look at it, in fact, from the perspective of the visitor or the patient who is coming into this environment for the first time.
I found that a really effective way to do this was using graphic medicine experiences — pictures and scenes in a graphic novel format.
Using a graphic-novel format, we ask the staff to look at a picture, to put themselves in the place of the person in a scene, and then to describe that person’s perspective, their feelings, their needs, their desires, their drivers, and the influences over their behaviour. This approach was successful in that it really forced the staff, sitting in silence for a few moments interrogating a scene with their imagination, to consider what the emergency department experience looks like through the eyes of one of their patients or visitors.
This is an approach from our Vistelar conflict management programme called see the world through their eyes, which is part of the five approaches we use for how to show people respect, even when it is difficult.
The Empathy Triad
Through this graphic novel approach, the use of video clips, and the stories that the staff told themselves, we were able to activate the Empathy Triad:
- Acknowledge their perspective
- Seek to understand
- Anticipate the person’s needs
Further Reading
Dynamis provides a comprehensive conflict management training programme which spans the whole spectrum of encounters in a hospital environment. In this series of posts, our Director of Training reflects on key ideas in addressing conflict in the hospital.
This guide on conflict management, personal safety, and Dynamis training is part of our ongoing work with schools and academies.