Date: Self-paced
Venue: UCT Amathuba Online Learning Platform
Duration: 1 hour
Course fee: R 750 per person
CPD points = 1 (Ethics)
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Presenter: Dr Heidi Matisonn
Course Content
“Climb into someone’s skin and walk around in it.” This iconic call to empathy from To Kill a Mockingbird has long inspired healthcare professionals to connect deeply with patients. But in today’s strained clinical environments, is empathy still serving us - or is it part of the problem?
This provocative talk challenges the assumption that empathy is always beneficial in healthcare. Drawing on a real-life story of a burnt-out HIV clinician and a striking question from a medical student - “Is not caring always a bad thing?”- the talk explores how excessive emotional identification with patients may actually contribute to moral suffering, burnout, and compromised care.
Using insights from neuroscience, including the work of Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki, we’ll distinguish between empathy - the sharing of another’s pain -and compassion - a prosocial, action-oriented response grounded in warmth and care. While empathy can trigger distress and self-related overwhelm, compassion offers a more resilient, sustainable foundation for healthcare work.
In high-stakes, resource-constrained settings like South Africa, where clinicians are already under extraordinary pressure, asking them to “walk in their patients’ shoes” may do more harm than good. Instead, we need a model of care that walks with patients - side by side - through systems that demand both courage and connection.
This talk invites healthcare professionals, educators, and students to rethink the emotional demands of care and consider a more sustainable path forward - one rooted not in emotional overidentification, but in the steady, grounded practice of compassion.
This course is open to: Health professionals, allied health professionals and interested members of the public