Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect The Practice Of Medicine Quotes

Empathy--the ability to identify with someone else's suffering--is certainly a prerequisite for a genuine apology.

In general, empathy is easier the more we can identify with someone. When we can genuinely envision ourselves in a situation, it's possible to intuit what that person's suffering might feel like.

Hospital life--with its byzantine array of moving parts layered atop the unpredictable rhythms of illness--is a permanent state of flux.

But I realized that not only did I need to keep tuning my skills as a doctor, I also had to figure out a way to live with the uncertainty of medicine and its attendant anxiety.

Burnout also leads to a large swath of physicians who aren't as empathetic toward their patients as they could be.

But at the most basic level, doctors need to be able to come forward with their errors and near-misses, otherwise we will never know where the problems lay.