Dr. Emily Tincher, Senior Director of Pet Health at Nationwide, joins the podcast to discuss the “Skill of Clinical Empathy.” She and Dr. Roark talk about spectrum of care and define the term “Clinical Empathy”. They compare notes on how good healthcare providers are measured, and Emily walks through the components of Clinical Empathy and how they can be applied in the veterinary exam room.
This episode is sponsored and made possible ad-free by Nationwide®!
LINKS
Nationwide spectrum of care: spectrum-of-care.com
Evidence-based medicine for pyometra: https://avmajournals.avma.org/view/journals/javma/260/S2/javma.20.12.0713.xml
Veterinary Leadership Institute’s Trek:
https://veterinaryleadershipinstitute.org/vli-trek/
Review article of clinical empathy in human medicine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4294163/
Family Quality of Life article for spectrum of care, Brown et al.: https://avmajournals.avma.org/view/journals/javma/aop/javma.23.01.0016/javma.23.01.0016.xml?tab_body=supplementary-materials
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Dr. Emily Tincher is a collaborative and data-driven leader who advocates for a pet-parent centered approach to communication and medicine through spectrum of care approaches. She is a second-generation veterinarian and a 2016 Auburn University’s College of Veterinary Medicine graduate. Emily has practiced clinically in small animal emergency and general practice.
As the Senior Director of Pet Health at Nationwide, she oversees operations and strategy in the veterinary space, including industry relationships and outreach to veterinary students, veterinarians, and veterinary teams. Emily serves on the AVMA Early Career Development Committee and is President of the Board of Directors for the Veterinary Leadership Institute.
Outside of veterinary medicine, Emily enjoys traveling with her husband Kyle, competing with her horse (Blue) in the sport of Eventing, and endlessly spoiling her two perfect dogs (Tuxedo and Cricket) and rotten orange tabby (Exploding Poptart).
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Andy Roark:
Welcome, everybody to the Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, I got a great one for you. I’m here with my friend, Dr. Emily Tincher. She is the Senior Director of Pet Health at Nationwide. She is a good friend of mine. I have known her for years and years and years. She’s been on the podcast many times talking about many different subjects.
We are here today talking about spectrum of care and what she calls the skill of clinical empathy. Emily is doing a ton of lecturing on exam room communication. I geek out about exam room communication, how we talk to pet owners, how we communicate, recommendations, things like that. She’s got a lot of data and is really doing some neat stuff. And so, I’m always interested in what she’s doing, keeping up with her. And so, I wanted to get her in and I said, “Hey, I’m hearing you talking about skill of clinical empathy, and you’re talking about it in very specific, very sort of objective ways. I want you to break this thing apart for me. What are you talking about and what does it look like in the exam room?” And so, she jumps right into it. This is a great episode. There’s a lot of really useful tips and pearls, a lot of “How do you say it?” type phrasings. Anyway, I really like this a lot. So guys, I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did. This episode is brought to you ad-free by Nationwide. Guys, let’s get into it.
Kelsey Beth Carpenter:
(Singing) This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to the Cone of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Emily Tincher. Thanks for being here.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
Thanks so much for having me back. It’s great to see you.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, always. Oh, I love seeing you. I love having you on the podcast. We’ve had some really wonderful discussions over the last couple of years and I always enjoy it. You are one of the main people that I talk about communication exam room, communication stuff with. I think you and I are really enjoying looking at spectrum of care stuff and the way that we’re sort of changing the way that we talk to pet owners. And I always appreciate your insight on keeping care accessible and affordable. And so, I’m back today to kind of dig into some stuff that you’re doing.
And again, just let me pause for a second and just say, I really think you’ve done this amazing work as far as making spectrum of care into something that actually has specifics that people can talk about. I think a lot of times this is a term that there’s a lot of hand waving and a lot of we’re saying this term, but what you’re thinking and what I’m thinking are radically different. And I think you’ve done really good work as far as laying down some empiric data and case studies and analyses that actually help us say, “When we talk about spectrum of care, this exactly is what we’re talking about, and this is the difference in outcomes that we’re talking about. And this is the difference in hard dollar prices that we’re talking about.”
And that’s the stuff that I really geek out on. I think otherwise, it kind of gets lost in, like I said, a lot of hand waving and sort of flowery language. Everyone goes away feeling good, but none of them actually agreed to anything or even really got the same experience from the conversation. So I think you do that really well. So let me just pause and say thank you for that.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
Well, thank you. That’s very kind of you. I think part of what has helped us to really gather around a common definition for spectrum of care and then say, “Okay, we’re not going to just advocate for, to your point, hand waving and saying, ‘We have to do things better. We have to provide more care to more pets.'” And we think about how we do that, I think a big part of how we’ve gotten there at Nationwide is working really closely with others that are leading in the space. And we’ll get a chance to talk about some of them today, too.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Well, good. That’s awesome. Well, so you’re out doing a lot of lectures. You’re talking a lot about exam room communication. You’ve got a Nationwide… Last time you were on, we were talking about a survey of pet owners and coming back and behaviors that they liked and didn’t like, and kind of some communication feedback that pet owners were giving on vet medicine. And we talked about that last time. And so, you’ve been doing a lot of lecturing on that.
I wanted to drill in specifically to a concept that you’ve been bringing up called the skill of clinical empathy. And I talk a lot about empathizing with pet owners, but you’ve really kind of, as you do, drill this down into some hard nuts and bolts data. And so, I want to get you to unpack that idea a little bit here today, because I know that so many of us spend time in the exam room and we’re talking to pet owners a lot. What do you mean when you talk about the skill of clinical empathy?
Dr. Emily Tincher:
Yeah. Thanks for the question. And I love talking about exam room communications, but especially with you, because I know we just could geek out about it and get very excited because it’s such a great way that we can help people to helping their pets and keep that whole pet family together. So just thanks again for having me back, so excited.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, sure.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
So what does it mean to explore the skill of clinical empathy? I’m going to start with a case. And we’ll come back to it a couple of times throughout, just because I think I know I learn best through storytelling. And I want us to think about a type of case that whether we’re in general practice or emergency medicine where I’ve spent most of my time, we’ve probably seen, and that is a condition called pyometra. So pyometra, what pops into your brain? Any sayings when I say the diagnosis of pyometra?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. “The sun never sets on a pyometra.” You mentioned that to me before, and it’s like they must say it at every vet school, because we did not go to the same vet school and I knew exactly what you were talking about when you brought that up.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
Yeah. So that saying of “Never let the sun set on a pyometra” is like lore in veterinary medicine.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
And we’ll talk a little bit about maybe why we might want to rethink that phrase, using that phrase, but that is ingrained inside of our brains. And so, I think some of the other things that kind of pop into our head when we make that diagnosis, what are some of the judgements that you may have seen or experienced when we see a pet, an older pet often, dog we’ll say, diagnosed with pyometra?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, you mean like the bad judgements, when you’re like, “Why?”
Dr. Emily Tincher:
Some of the bad, the negative things that might pop into our heads.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Well, you wonder why this wholly preventable condition is occurring, right? And you have judgments around that. I would guess. That pops into my mind. You can’t help but… You can feel sorry for someone and also be like, “Why?” This was preventable.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
We could have potentially averted this. So yeah. So pyometra, an infection of the uterus, we know from our time in vet school and beyond that diagnosis is more common in dogs especially, we’ll limit to that and to leave out cats, more common in dogs as they get older, especially over the age of eight. And I know a lot of us, the first thing that pops into our head is, “Why is this happening?” This is an expensive, life-threatening problem that we have often feel like we’ve educated pet owners about. And the prophylactic thing that could have been done is spaying the dog. Okay, so we’re going to come back to that, but at least we’ve set the table with, this is the case that we’re going to use and think about as we consider the skill of clinical empathy and put it in the setting of spectrum of care.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Okay.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
So just to get us all back on the same page of, “What does the spectrum of care mean?” Really, the published definition of a spectrum of care is “to provide a range of diagnostic and treatment options from basic to advanced that meet pet family goals, values, and resources” of course including financial, but also there are other things that are included like time and just ability to bring the pet into the practice.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Sure.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
So lots of things to think about there. That’s our definition, published definition. We know that there are multiple options for how a pet can be treated when we consider evidence-based medicine. So how do we actually practice a spectrum of care? First, we identify those pet family goals, values, and resources. And we talked about last time a little bit of the research that we’ve done at Nationwide with previously myGenomics advisors, now rebranded. We can put up a link to some information about that, but we’ll be releasing a tool later this year to help shortcut identifying those pet family goals and resources.
So we’ve done that. Let’s say we’ve had a little bit of an initial conversation, and then now we need to consider what the pet is presenting with in front of us. In this case, we’ll say pyometra. We’ll consider, “What are the evidence-based medicine options out there?” So what are the outcomes that might happen if we choose different treatment options across that range from basic to advance? We’ll come back to that in a second. But then, once we’ve identified those, the pet family-centered communication of just providing those options in a non-judgmental way is the next step.
So having that conversation and breaking it down to, “What are the skills that it takes to really present those options and make sure that a pet family understands what the pros and cons are of some of the options across that spectrum?” is a skill we can all learn. And it’s a skill that if I said to you, “We have a superpower that we can harness in the exam room, something that decreases medical board complaints, something that improves medical outcomes, and something that, in human medicine at least, actually makes physicians happier at their jobs and more likely to stay in their role.” Wouldn’t we all want to practice that skill?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
That’s clinical empathy.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, sure. That’s clinical empathy. Okay. That makes sense, yeah. It’s one of those things, it’s not always easy to pick that weight up. Do you agree with that? I have to get up for empathizing sometimes. I’m just being honest. When I met my best, when I’m well-rested and I’ve had some calories, I am all about it. I’m like, “Let’s go in and see where these people are coming from.” I think the default for a lot of us as we get tired or if you see case after case after case after case, it’s an extra weight that we pick up. Do you know what I mean? I think it’s easier sometimes to be cynical and judgemental than it is to find empathy. Do you agree with that?
Dr. Emily Tincher:
I do agree with that, I think. And I still pick up some relief shifts in ER, so when I feel myself becoming more cynical, becoming more judgmental, of letting those thoughts creep in as I’m working with a pet family, I know for me, self-awareness wise for me, I need to take a step back and say, “Emily, have you said yes to too many things? Have you eaten lunch today? Are you taking care of yourself?” Because you can’t take care of others if you don’t take care of yourself.
I think what’s really interesting about, and I want to really break down how do you practice the scale of clinical empathy in a moment, but what’s really interesting about considering the best possible outcome being the one that’s the best for the family. And I really enjoyed how I’ve heard you talk about it before, the best possible outcome is the long-term outcome for building trust, for working together, and for that pet coming back to see us again.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Right.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
When we do that, when we really say, “Okay. What I might choose might not be what they’re going to choose, but it might be what’s best for the family, the pet and the family together.” There’s some mounting evidence that that decreases moral distress, and actually might help us to feel like it’s a little bit easier to pick that weight up if we can rethink in our minds what best care means and what that looks like for each individual pet.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I really like that a lot. I’m actually midway through writing an article right now about… Because I’ve been thinking a lot about how we measure ourselves as doctors. Okay? And so, my thesis that I put forward in this sort of piece is that we all came up in school, and we got grades for our work and we got gold stars and we looked at our GPA and we had these different measurements and we were like, “I’m successful because I met this standard.” And what I would put forward is that I think most of us have standards that we measure ourselves by. And there’s reasons that we pick our standards. And we pick our standards based on what other people tell us is important or what’s easy to measure, what’s objective and simple.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
What we observe from our peers as we talk to each other, yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark:
What we observe, yeah. Exactly. And I think a lot of those measures are not the best measures for making us happy or truly bringing across what we want to accomplish. For example, is your measure of your quality as a doctor tied to your average client transaction? I don’t think it is. It’s not all or none. It’s not a linear relationship. But I don’t think that you look and say, “I saw 32 patients yesterday, which means I am an exceptional doctor.” I’m like, “I don’t think that that’s how that works.” That is a metric.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark:
It is part of what we do. It means… I don’t know what it means. And I’m like, I’m not even saying it means you’re an efficient doctor. I don’t know what you’re doing in there. You know what I mean? But I do see people grab onto those metrics and they say, “Aha, this is how I measure myself.” And I love where you’re going with this, because my big question to myself has been, “What are the measurements that actually really matter? What are the ones that matter for the pets? And what are the ones that matter for me as a person, where I can come out and say, ‘I did a good job today.’?” And if I come out and say, “I didn’t get a CT scan for that abdominal pain dog, and so I’m a failure.” That seems…
Dr. Emily Tincher:
“So I’m a bad doctor.” Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark:
“And that means I’m a bad doctor.” And I know that sounds ridiculous, and I chose that extreme example. But a lot of us live in a microcosm of that, of, “I didn’t get that abdominal ultrasound and that would have been the best medicine.”
Dr. Emily Tincher:
Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark:
“And so, I feel like I’m less than.” And when I talk about this case to my friends, I may conveniently leave that part out because I don’t want them to say, “Well, why didn’t you do an ultrasound?”
Dr. Emily Tincher:
I’m worried about them judging me. Yeah. A peer-to-peer judgment can be tricky for us. I really like the way that you talked about that. It’s, “What are the metrics that mean something to us?” And I think one of the kind of ways that we’ve been talking about spectrum of care and why it’s been so important for us at Nationwide to provide a specific path for doing it, not just saying, “We should provide more care to more pets,” is that we want to rethink some of those metrics of how we assess ourselves and how we… Average client transaction is such a great one, because I remember growing up in my parents’ practice and just hearing, “If your average client transaction is higher, you’re a better doctor.” That that was a fact.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
That was a fact. But looking at truly what’s best for the pet and in the context of what’s going on with the entire pet family, sometimes if we focus on that to an extreme, the pet may never come back and we may make pet families inadvertently, I think, accidentally, but feel ashamed, but say yes to us and then never come back.
And I think that’s what the skill of clinical empathy, I think, really does help us avoid by employing lots of core communication skills. So first, we have to understand, so, “What does it look like?” Literally, “To employ the skill of clinical empathy, what does it look like?” First, you have to understand what the pet family’s goals are and what their resources are. And we have to do things like ask open-ended questions and we have to be curious. And I think if nothing else, I just returned from the Veterinary Leadership Institute’s Trek, our second in-person, 25 hours of race CE event where we kind of talk about a lot of these skills, and we employ them all and we understand what is going on in our brains. Okay?
So we’ve asked open-ended questions, we’ve listened, active listening and reflective listening skills. Then we have to communicate back to the pet family that we do understand. And so, this is where, as a field, there’s some publications about how empathetic we think that we are. And I totally believe it. As veterinarians, as technicians, as healthcare teams, we really do care about the pet families and the pets that we serve. But a lot of times, and there’s a couple of studies that documented this part, we don’t actually say it out loud. We don’t actually communicate it back, so pet families don’t know that. We feel it, but they don’t know it.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
And so, communicating and saying out loud, think statements like, “That sounds hard” or “I can’t imagine what you’re going through.” Those are the ways that we begin to communicate back and employ the skill of clinical empathy to say, “Okay. I understand that you’re going through something.” It might be stress about something that I don’t find to be stressful. “You’re worried about a torn toenail and I’m confident your pet’s going to be okay. But it’s still stressful. Seeing a lot of blood for a torn toenail is still something that’s scary for pets. So I understand it’s scary. I promise you that we’re going to make Fluffy feel better and that that bleeding is going to stop soon. We’re going to help with that.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
So communicating that out loud, which those couple studies, one showed that in as few as 7% of exam room communications do we actually say it out loud.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
Another one was more in the forties, but less than half the time do we say out loud the things that we’re thinking inside of our brain, that we can identify with something in there, something about the stress or the difficulty that a pet family is going through, even if it’s small.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Okay.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
And then, the last piece of employing that clinic empathy is acting in a different way that says, “I’ve listened to you. I understand that you are stressed or that something big or something small might be going on. And I’m going to now change the way that I might have acted accordingly.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
Right.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
And for us in an exam room setting, that often looks like communicating that range of treatment options or diagnostic or treatment options back to them in a way that reflects the conversation that we just had.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
And so, for example, coming back to our pyometra case example, there was a great paper published, I think last year at this point, 2023 is a whizzing by, about what some of the treatment options might be across a spectrum of care for pyometra. The lead author was Dr.DeClementi at the ASPCA. And they investigated, “What does it look like to treat pyometra not necessarily before the sun sets?”
Dr. Andy Roark:
All right.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
So look at things like, “Okay. What do we do outside of a referral setting? What are the outcomes?” So we know the most advanced option for treating pyometra. It’s going to see a Board Certified surgeon at a specialty referral hospital, and we’ll leave out what the additional diagnostics and things are, but probably a couple of days of hospitalization associated with that.
Their research showed that of the pets that went forward with treatment, that weren’t euthanized, so treatment primarily being surgical. Of the surgery pets, and over 400 dogs were included in their retrospective study, there was a 97% success rate, survival rate of dogs that had surgery in a more general practice type setting, which is fantastic. There are not many things that we have a 97% success rate for a life-threatening condition at.
And one of the other things that they noted is that there was no significant difference in outcome for pets that had had a several days long, up to a week long of clinical signs. And so, that idea of euthanasia or you have to go to referral or nothing else and have surgery absolutely tonight, maybe is something that we do need to think about based again on evidence-based medicine, but then communicating that back to the pet family. Coming back to that skill of clinical empathy and saying, “Okay. I have listened, I’ve heard.” And maybe we have someone who says, “I don’t want to take any chances. I want to do absolutely everything that I can for my female dog who has pyometra.”
“Great. We have an emergency referral hospital. We’re going to send you down the road and go have that most advanced-level care. But know that the cost, in my experience, can be from $5,000-$8,000 for that surgery and hospitalization afterwards. It’s not an inexpensive cost.” So to then have the evidence base to then communicate to them and say, “But you know what? There are other options I want you to know about.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
“And we can do surgery here. And unfortunately, it’s pretty late at night, so I can’t do surgery here tonight. My staff has to go home.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
“But let’s talk about the risks and the pros and cons behind waiting at night. But we can do surgery tomorrow for maybe $1,000 maybe.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
“Let’s get your pet started on… We’ll start things like fluids, start things like antibiotics, and we can perform surgery tomorrow.” Now that we have the evidence base and can talk about some of the risks associated with that, but a pretty good evidence that that significantly lower cost can still have a great outcome, that’s a game changer for pets.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
That saves lives in conditions where it really is a life or death situation, especially when we think about, there’s another great article that is really recent just from I think last month with the main author of Dr. Carolyn Brown, who’s had a couple of great spectrum of care articles in JAVMA now, where they talk about incorporating multiple different facets into a family quality of life. And so, they define that as bringing it over from human medicine. They define that as there are pet factors, there are family based factors. And then, there are some external things that are kind of beyond either of those that might go into how any decision about a pet’s medical choices would fit in.
And I think what’s really interesting about putting that framework together the way that they have is that helps us to say, “Okay. If decisions are that complicated from every pet family that we’re interacting with, some things that they tell us about, some things that they don’t, we really have to stop feeling so much guilt if they choose something that’s not the same as us.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
“We have to really embrace, and it gives us the freedom to embrace that we’re not the ones with all of the decision-making power here.” And what a great feeling of permission, really, to bring the family in and have their values represented, because they actually are, whether we think about it that way or not.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I like that a lot, I really do. I think coming back to sort of the how we measure ourselves, let’s not kid ourselves. We have an age of empowered patients. If you look at human care, the days of people showing up and saying, “Doctor, what should I do?” and then following the doctor’s advice, that’s for their own healthcare, those days, they’re over. It used to very much be that way of when the doctor said this is what we did, this is what we did. And it’s not anymore, right? Patients have very strong opinions about the treatments that they’re going to have and how they’re going to behave.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark:
And what they’re going to do.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
And more access to information than they ever have.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Oh, gosh, yeah. Well, now we’re going into the age of artificial intelligence, where people can ask questions to ChatGPT and get, honestly, a lot of times, some pretty solid information if they how to use the AI.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark:
But anyway, when we’re dealing with empowered people who have strong preferences, and they have buying and purchasing power, and they believe that they have buying and purchasing power, the idea that we can control what they do or what path they take, I think that that’s just obviously false. But also, it sets us up to feel bad about the work that we’re doing when we don’t have any control over the outcome, really.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
We absolutely have influence.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yes.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
We want to have influence and help pets receive the care that they need. It’s our role to help educate on what that looks like, but yeah, without accepting the responsibility for many things ultimately that are far beyond our control. And back to one of the metrics that we view ourselves on for success, I think one of the cool things about clinical empathy, and I hope that we have more research coming in veterinary medicine, there’s not a lot right now. If you, for example, look up clinical empathy and teaching empathy in human medicine, there are over 1.5 million articles that come up, which is not the case in vet med.
Dr. Andy Roark:
No.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
But there are a lot of… We can lean on that. We can say, “Hey. We’re applied scientists, so we believe in choosing treatment and diagnostic options that are backed by evidence and what the outcomes are.” We believe in that from communication perspectives, too. And if you want to measure yourself as a doctor, even if we simplify everything else, you say, “I don’t care about fewer malpractice claims.” None of us would say that, right?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Right.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
That sounds incredibly scary. If you say, “I just want to focus on better patient outcomes,” the interesting thing is that clinical empathy has been linked to that. So in human medicine, for example, patients that are under the care of a physician that actively employs the skill of clinical empathy, diabetic patients, for example, have better controlled diabetes statistically than those that don’t employ the skill of clinical empathy. It just helps. The idea that we communicate in a way that pet families know that we care, and that we’re taking into account what they’ve got going on, it makes them more likely to trust us, is what I see from that.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, of course, then. Yeah.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
Which is cool.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, I completely agree. And so much of our job is about trust and buy-in. And if pet owners trust us and if they buy into the plan, we’re going to get better outcomes than if they don’t trust us and they’re not bought into this plan.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
Yes.
Dr. Andy Roark:
That’s so common sensical, but I love see it backed up. And I love it when people pick that up and say, “Well, if that’s true, how do I adjust my behavior?”
Dr. Emily Tincher:
Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Emily, do you have some favorite resources if people are picking this up and going, “I would love to dig more into this.” Do you have favorites that I could put forward?
Dr. Emily Tincher:
I do. And I also want to mention one final thing, because I think sometimes the word empathy, to your point of it, it can feel heavy sometimes. The word empathy, if we don’t think about specifically how we are going to employ it, can have some tricky connotations. And so, I just want to mention what I’m not advocating for. So one specific kind of empathy, personal distress empathy, where we literally take on the emotions of others, especially of the clients that we’re talking to in the exam room, that’s dangerous. So we have to set up boundaries and we need to be able to display cognitive or perspective taking empathy, where we can see and think about what they might be going through, but without crossing over to personal distress empathy, which is literally feeling it all day, every day. So I just want to make sure I make that really clear.
Dr. Andy Roark:
That’s such a great call-out, yeah.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
They are not the same.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yes. Well, we see that a lot in burnout in technicians and in doctors. You can’t carry emotional burden after emotional burden after emotional burden. But I know some people who say, “Well, that means that you can’t empathize.” Oh, you absolutely can empathize with the experience that they’re having without putting it on yourself and feeling it. I think that’s great.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
Without carrying it. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, exactly. Resources, what have you got?
Dr. Emily Tincher:
So some favorite resources, so I mentioned a couple, so I want to make sure we link to the articles that I mentioned that Dr. Brown wrote, for example, which is a new one. And then, I will send you a couple others maybe for the show notes that talk about just a… There’s a great review article that talks about the benefits of clinical empathy as a skill, again, primarily in human medicine, because we don’t have as much research that we can lean on in veterinary medicine, but that just kind of lays out the incredible case for, “Is this something really I need to invest my time in, this kind of thing that sounds like a soft skill of clinical empathy?”
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.
Dr. Emily Tincher:
No, it’s a crucial skill. It is an absolute superpower that our whole team can harness. And I would say, a small plug for the Veterinary Leadership Institute, of which I’m on the board, that if you’re interested in sending a team member to come and kind of work on these skills and practice them in an experiential learning setting, we have two different onsite events that we host, but the one for vet healthcare teams out in practice primarily is our Trek event.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Sounds great. Well, cool. I’ll put links to all that stuff and I’ll get some nice links from you, and I’ll put all that stuff in the show notes so everybody can have it. Emily, thank you so much for being here. Guys, thanks so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoy this as much as I do, and I will talk to you soon. And that is our episode. That’s what I got for you guys. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. Thanks to Emily. Thanks to Nationwide again for making this episode possible ad-free. Guys, be well. Take care. I will talk to you again soon.
