Letters | Hong Kong’s healthcare system needs a dose of empathy
Readers discuss the importance of human-centred medical system design, new traffic regulations, and the legalisation of basketball betting
My dentist cut me off a couple of weeks ago during a cleaning. “That’s a myth, we’re trained!” she snapped when I mentioned enamel erosion fears. She repeated this with the same clinical certainty I’ve seen in Hong Kong’s overworked healthcare workers. She wasn’t wrong, but in her haste to defend her profession she missed the chance to transform anxiety into trust with 15 seconds of listening.
For generations, doctors have been celebrated as healing hands and compassionate hearts. But today’s healthcare systems, which are designed more for efficiency instead of patient-centred care, often leave little room for listening or connection.
Imagine a healthcare system where a geriatrician’s fluency in palliative care protocols is matched by their mastery of behavioural economics, allowing them to redesign dementia wards into spaces which calm agitation instead of medicating it. Globally, boundary-spanning practitioners such as Dr Vonda Wright – an orthopaedic surgeon with over 30,000 subscribers on YouTube – are novelties rather than being cultivated systemically. If healthcare education is only funded to meet regulatory requirements, we will remain stuck in armchair strategising about a true cross-disciplinary approach.
While some studies have shown that empathy demonstrated by physicians has a direct impact on patients’ clinical outcomes, its cultivation and integration into medical education remain under-explored. If systematically measured and rewarded, empathy training could transform healthcare for both physicians and patients.