{
  "abstract": "Introduction National Health Service (NHS) failures at Mid-Staffordshire, Shrewsbury and Telford, and East Kent reached the same conclusion: leaders who fail to listen and understand put patients at risk. The NHS response has been to promote compassionate leadership. Yet, compassion often entails emotional merging, which can blur boundaries and lead to fatigue. By contrast, empathic leadership and curiosity-driven perspective-taking, rather than emotional merging, offers a promising new way forward. Yet no practical method exists to teach empathic leadership. To fill this gap, we aimed to develop heuristics (‘rules of thumb’) for empathic leadership and create a course to teach them.Methods 21 healthcare leaders attended a structured workshop. Using established heuristic development and curriculum design methods, participants generated, refined and prioritised heuristics for empathic leadership, then co-designed a training course to teach them.Results The group produced 35 heuristics and prioritised 12, including ‘Listen first, speak last’, ‘Say sorry’, and ‘Walk the shop floor’. A one-day interprofessional empathic leadership course was then co-designed, featuring experiential learning, role play and implementation planning.Conclusion We identified and prioritized heuristics for empathic leadership and produced a course to teach them. The short course may support healthcare leaders to strengthen empathic leadership in practice.",
  "authors": [
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Jeremy Howick"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Amber Bennett-Weston"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Bioethics and Medical Humanities, Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public, University of California Berkeley School of Public Health, Berkeley, California, USA"
      ],
      "name": "Jodi Halpern"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "De Montfort University, Leicester, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Ivan Browne"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, Leicester, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Danielle Burnett"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, Leicester, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Harry Dudson"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "NHS England, Redditch, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Lucy Duncombe"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "University of Oxford, Oxford, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Ashok Handa"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "University of Oxford, Oxford, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Sean Henegan"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "University of Exeter, Exeter, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Richard Holland"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Kerry Hood"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management, London, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Celia Ingham Clark"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, Leicester, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Mayur Lakhani"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "University of Leicester, Leicester, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Gregory Maniatopoulos"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "University of Leicester, Leicester, England, UK",
        "Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust - City Campus, Nottingham, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Joseph Manning"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "NHS England, Redditch, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Carolyn May"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, Leicester, England, UK",
        "University of Leicester, Leicester, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Daniel McDonald-Smith"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Douglas Knowledge Partners, London, UK"
      ],
      "name": "James Mountford"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA"
      ],
      "name": "Albert G. Mulley"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Grangegorman Family Practice, Dublin, Ireland"
      ],
      "name": "Austin O’Carroll"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, Leicester, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Nakul Patel"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Apollo Hospital Chennai, Chennai, India"
      ],
      "name": "Aswin Sayiram"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Inclusion Healthcare, Leicester, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Sarah Styles"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management, London, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Rich Withnall"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "University of Leicester - Northampton Centre, Leicester, England, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Cleo White"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK",
        "IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark"
      ],
      "name": "Bent Flyvbjerg"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Novel approach to teaching empathic leadership using heuristics",
  "uid": "e451ea6e-7d4b-54bc-a711-0d304e2d9985"
}