ArticleA&A practice2025
What Is Clinical Empathy in Anesthesiology? Perspectives From Practicing Anesthesiologists.
Article in A&A practice, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Empathy, communication, and a human touch in clinical practice.Journal of anesthesia, analgesia and critical care · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundTo 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.
methodsPracticing 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.
resultsThree 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.
conclusionsAlthough 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.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.