Health Care

1. The Empathy Campaign—On an emotional level, one of the strongest campaigns created by the Cleveland Clinic was their “Empathy Campaign.” As a large, major international center, this campaign, as can be seen in the YouTube site, was viewed over two million times. Its reception externally and among internal employees was extremely positive and continues to receive favorable market response.

Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care

2 Source credibility is a major factor in communication—and who might be more credible than a physician. Physicians were once utilized in advertising cultural values and attitudes have changed.

Please watch this video of an advertisement for Camels cigarettes.

More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCMzjJjuxQI

ANSWER

Empathy in Healthcare Promotion

Empathy means to feel or understand the perspective of another person without having to have undergone their situation. It is the understanding of other’s feelings and feeling concerned for them hence the term empathetic concern. Empathetic concern is a central value in any profession and especially in healthcare. Empathy is a contributor to positive health outcomes and crucial to patients’ wellbeing and satisfaction (Everson et al., 2018). Lack of empathetic concern leads to poor treatment of patients, especially if a patient is in pain.  A doctor or a hospital practitioner without empathy is not likely to understand the patient’s pain, and this might and, on most occasions, is likely to affect the treatment of the patient (Parsons, et al., 2019).  The empathetic concern is also essential because apart from creating positive health outcomes, it also helps reduce burnout in health professionals and increases the feeling of fulfilment. This is because empathic concern enables the professionals to interact better with the patients, hence rewarding feeling.

Empathy is essential and not only in healthcare promotion. It is crucial to have empathetic concern as a person because it improves the general quality of life as one can positively interact with other people without making them feel like their issues are trivial or one does not understand them. In the healthcare system, there are different types of patients from all walks of life and races (Howick & Rees, 2017). Therefore healthcare practitioners need to show empathetic concern to increase the trust in hospitals, especially in marginalized communities. An African American is likely to come back to a health facility if the person who attends to them is empathetic and shows concern for their health (Everson et al., 2018). It is also likely that if they feel judged or not understood, they are likely to avoid the hospital until the situation gets out of hand. This also applies to people with disabilities and mental illness. Empathy is, therefore, important in healthcare promotion.

The camel cigarette brand passed cigarette smoking as cool by describing the cigarette as a cigarette that doctors mostly smoke. Doctors are essential people in society, and most young people want to associate with them, especially in the 1940s (Jackler & Ayoub, 2018). This advertisement had a negative impact on the youth and the country at large because by using doctors as their point of reference, they made nicotine look cool and interesting while, in reality, it is harmful to the health of anyone who uses it. The company went on to claim that the advertisement was not meant for teenagers and could not be held responsible for their smoking habits, but in reality, they promoted cigarette smoking and made it cool.

Many unhealthy habits are promoted through the shows that people watch on Television. The camel advertisement was one with many ethical grey areas, and it was wrong to use doctors in such a manner, especially in those years, as they were trusted people in the community. Doctors are known as credible sources of information, and by camel using them to advertise their brand, they made cigarette smoking look cool and not harmful (Jackler & Ayoub, 2018). If doctors smoke the camel cigarette, it means it is harmless compared to the other cigarettes, and people can therefore smoke without any problems. The company received backlash for the advertisement, although they kept denying that they were trying to get children to smoke. The advertisement, however, makes smoking look appealing and enjoyable.

References

Everson, N., Levett-Jones, T., & Pitt, V. (2018). The impact of educational interventions on the empathic concern of health professional students: A literature review. Nurse education in practice, 31, 104-111.

Howick, J., & Rees, S. (2017). Overthrowing barriers to empathy in healthcare: empathy in the age of the internet. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 110(9), 352-357.

Jackler, R. K., & Ayoub, N. F. (2018). ‘Addressed to you not as a smoker… but as a doctor’: doctor‐targeted cigarette advertisements in JAMA. Addiction, 113(7), 1345-1363.

Parsons, T., Tregunno, D., Joneja, M., Dalgarno, N., & Flynn, L. (2019). Using graphic illustrations to uncover how a community of practice can influence the delivery of compassionate healthcare. Medical humanities, 45(4), 381-387.