Empathetic practice, North America

For her Churchill Fellowship Douglas visited the USA and Canada in 2018 to meet experts in empathy training and see how practitioners and services were delivering such approaches and achieving good outcomes.

This article provides a summary of her key findings from services that support young people who offend. The report was published in 2022.

I wanted to explore through my fellowship what the impact might be of increased empathy in the systems and agencies that support some of our most socially excluded children, teenagers and young adults, who experience one or multiple agencies including youth justice, social care, education, and health. I knew from my interest in the subject of empathy that there were places in the USA and Canada that were teaching empathy to children and young people, (most notably “Roots of Empathy” that began in Canada and is now global). I knew that there were programmes in the United States and Canada directly teaching empathy to healthcare clinicians because it had been proven to increase positive health outcomes for patients. I had heard that New York police officers were being taught empathy and read research that pupils achieved better grades and were happier when they had better relationships with their teachers.