Clusters of empathy

There still is a Complexity in Primary Care group but it is now essentially silent. I've met several people through the group over the years.

It might be decades since James Gleick's book Chaos (1987) and yet there is plenty of mileage left in complexity. One of the people I met through the group and hoped to meet in Australia at the ICN Congress is Paul Bennett who informed me of the following paper:

Academic Psychiatry, 33:6, Nov-Dec 2009 p.489

Winseman, J., Malik, A., Morison, J., Balkoski, V. (2009) Students’ Views on Factors Affecting Empathy in Medical Education. Academic Psychiatry. 33:484–491.

In explaining Hodges' model to Paul he was struck by the conceptual clustering in this paper. It isn't that there is a direct match between the paper's figure 2 and the care (knowledge) domains of the model, but multidimensional scaling is a potential tool to explore Hodges' model too.

The influence of political factors in medical education might be another aspect to consider. This is a dimension Hodges' model can encompass.

An acute concern at present in the NHS is the prospect of a seven day service, necessitating changes to the contracts of doctors and other disciplines.

Thanks to:
Paul Bennett, Primary Health Care Education Officer
Broken Hill University Department of Rural Health - Broken Hill
PO Box 457, BROKEN HILL NSW 2880
http://sydney.edu.au/medicine/drh/