Learning to Practice Compassionate Care: Medical Students Discuss Their Most Memorable Lessons

Compassion in interactions between physicians and patients can have a therapeutic effect independent of the technical medical treatment provided. However, training physicians to effectively communicate compassion is challenging. This study explores how medical students experienced training focused on interacting with patients by examining students’ reports of particularly memorable lessons. Six focus groups were conducted with medical students (total n = 48) in their fourth year of training. We report on responses from students to the question, “What was the most memorable lesson you have learned about interacting with patients?” Students discussed lessons aimed at patient-centered physical navigation, interpersonal navigation, and perspective taking. Concerns were raised that navigation techniques felt inauthentic and that perspective taking was too time consuming to be sustainable in actual practice. While perspective-taking exercises should motivate medical students to treat every patient with dignity by demonstrating the complexity of others’ lives, if students assume that full understanding is a prerequisite to delivery of compassionate care, they may dismiss explicit techniques of patient-centered care as inauthentic and perceive compassion and efficiency as mutually exclusive.