(ADVANCING HEALTH CARE THROUGH PARTNERSHIPS CONTINUED) Gateway Health, for instance, has already proven to be an advocate for equity in the health care industry. Gateway Health recently discovered racial bias in a risk score model that led to the underappreciation of certain health risk factors facing Black Americans. Gateway Health’s data analysis team incorporated a richer dataset including food and housing insecurity, and structural poverty indicators, to create a risk score that reflects the full spectrum of social determinants of health. In other models these social determinants may go unrecognized. Finally, it’s clear that we must put partnerships to work to address the largest problems of our time. On a global scale, we’ve already seen the impact that partnerships between public and private sectors can have, namely, in the creation of a coronavirus vaccine in record time. As Dr. Chelsea Clinton, vice chair of the Clinton Foundation, noted during the Fifth International Vatican Conference, we can’t let these newfound partnerships wither now that the vaccines are in production. “We have an urgent need for the largest public-private partnerships we have ever seen to rapidly scale-up vaccine manufacturing and distribution around the world,” she said. If we leverage the collective knowledge of providers, insurers, science experts and community members, we can do more than just rise to this challenge. We’ll be ready to prevent challenges that lie ahead.
Empathy and Compassion Robin Smith, MD, President, Cura Foundation The capacity to understand and reflect the emotions of others is the bedrock of ethical thought and religious and philosophical traditions. During the Fifth International Vatican Conference, Dr. Thupten Jinpa, president of the Compassion Institute, noted that nearly all spiritual groups have some version of the Golden Rule – treat others the way you would like to be treated. Dr. Stephen Trzeciak, author of “Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring Makes a Difference” and chair and chief of medicine at Cooper University Health Care, Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, found that in patient care, more compassion is associated with “more caring and higher quality of care” and less burnout among health care workers.
Dr. Jinpa found that empathy and compassion are powerful and motivating factors for individuals. Compassionate acts give joy and a sense of purpose to the individuals practicing them. This concept is supported by the research of Dr. Richard Davidson, the founding director of the Wisconsin Healthy Minds Institute, who noted: “It may well be that empathy is a necessary precursor to compassion.” Over the last several decades, much research has been conducted to build on the seminal study on empathy circuits in the human brain conducted by Dr. Tania Singer, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Society. Dr. Singer’s 2004 study involved 16 couples where one partner either received a painful stimulus or had to watch their partner receive a painful stimulus. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) captured images from the couples’ brains that showed patterns of similar activation when people both experienced and watched another in pain. The increased activation in both of those regions was correlated with higher empathy scores, suggesting that the brain’s “pain matrix” is partially activated when we watch another suffer. More recent work has compared brain activity associated not only with empathy but with compassion. Dr. Davidson’s research shows that the neural circuits for empathy and compassion are different from one another. When we empathize with someone in pain, we experience activity in the pain matrix and this could result in negative emotions. But when we generate compassion, the ventral striatum associated with positive emotion is activated. While too much empathy may have a negative effect, practicing compassion might counteract it. Experiencing both emotions has a great effect on the individual. Furthermore, the transition between empathy and compassion requires additional neural tools. Dr. Davidson’s work has found that compassion can be trained and, indeed, may require the activation of a frontoparietal executive control
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