The words to use
- Clinical empathy
- Understanding a patient's situation, perspective and feelings, communicating that understanding and checking it is accurate, then acting on it helpfully (Mercer and Reynolds, 2002).
- Sympathy
- Feeling sorry for someone from the outside. It can be kind, but it doesn't need you to listen, so on its own it shows an examiner very little.
- Compassion
- Empathy that moves you to act to relieve someone's distress. It is one of the six values in the NHS Constitution.
- Compassion fatigue
- Figley's term for a form of caregiver burnout: the emotional cost of caring for people who are suffering. He suggests learning to switch off from work so you can recover.
- Cue
- A hint at a feeling the person hasn't named, such as a pause, a change of subject, or "I'm fine" said too quickly.
