Empathy: The Human Connection To Patient Care

Through speech pathology, people are reached and shown compassion who are typically considered outcasts in society. SLPs work with individuals who are struggling with various sets of problems and help to solve those problems through undivided attention and spirits of patience and willingness to aid people with speech, language, and mental impairments. I believe this would be a good career fit for me due to my heart for people and my teaching spirit. My mom’s perspective of me pursuing a career as an SLP is that it would be a good fit due to my kind and gentle spirit and conduciveness with working with struggling individuals. I also have an immediate family legacy of multiple speech pathologists that work in both the medical and educational fields which increases my knowledge and familiarity with the career. While I believe that speech pathology would ultimately be a good fit for me, I tend to struggle with patience, a key component of working as an SLP, which is a challenge that I would have to work to overcome in order fulfill my role as a speech pathologist.

Empathy should play an active role in the daily lives of everyone, but in particular in the day-to-day lives of a healthcare professional. Healthcare professionals have the unique and challenging job of counseling patients in times of need, whether that is in the setting of a newly diagnosed disease or in the death of a family member. This unique challenge requires all healthcare professionals to be skilled at using empathy in the appropriate circumstances.

What is empathy? Different people have identified different definitions for empathy. Adler, R., G., R., & Sevigny, A. define empathy as “the ability to re-create another person’s perspective, to experience the world from the other’s point of view” (2015, p. 50). Theresa Wiseman identified four qualities of empathy: “perspective taking, staying out of judgment, recognizing emotions in people and communicating that” (as cited in Brown, 2013). What do these definitions have in common? They both include the idea that empathy requires the power to place yourself in another person’s shoes.

Originally, I was drawn to speech pathology after my sister’s diagnosis of Autism at the age of three. Watching Diane struggle with language development and acquisition while other children seemed to grasp these skills naturally is what initially sparked my interest in helping families like my own. At the start of my junior year, I set out to obtain experiences working with different populations. Toward the latter half of junior year, I became involved as a clerical volunteer at the Sacramento Scottish Rite Childhood Language Center. By senior year, I was balancing a full course load alongside three volunteer experiences. In addition to Scottish Rite Childhood Language Center, I divided my time between tutoring at a neighboring elementary school in the Twin Rivers School District and serving as an intern at the Autism Center for Excellence (ACE). During my undergraduate experience, I welcomed the opportunity to work with students that struggled with literacy, language, and pragmatic skills. After graduation, it was my goal to obtain additional experience in the field as a speech-language pathology assistant.

The importance of empathy in any helping profession, medical or social, cannot be overstated. The workers that exemplified it in their practice did the best that they could with their limited resources.

According to the American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA) 2016 School Survey, Speech Pathologists rated the amount of paperwork, high workload/caseload size, and limited time for collaboration and budget constraints among their greatest challenges. Immense pressure is placed on the SLPs in a school setting. Children with learning disabilities have a multitude of different needs, and for many, thirty-minute therapy sessions are not enough time to adequately address their problems. Furthermore, in many schools, Speech-Language Pathologists have had to make up some or all of missed student sessions themselves without any substitute coverage. This in turn has increased group therapy sizes which compromises the quality

Empathy is the ability to understand the situation and share the feelings and also be able to identify a client's experiences. A counsellor must be able to imagine how it feels to be in a client's shoes and manage to understand the situation from their point of view. "Empathy has been described in different ways: walking in another's shoes, entering into another person's frame of reference or having the ability to experience life as the other person does by entering the person's world of thoughts, feelings, emotions and meanings", (Martha,2012) .In the other hand, the good counsellor still have the ability to be understanding even though the they are not agree with the client's perspective in order to solve the client's issues effectively.

It is through working in clinics as per the SLPA coursework at CSULB that my eyes have been open to the frustrations faced by those who have difficulties with communication. When working with a child with autism, I have realized that speech language pathologist not only helps the individual client, but also help others who are close to them, such as caregivers, who’s daily lives are affected by these communication difficulties. Through

Keaunna Knox has been a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) since 2007, and has worked ever since 2000 with children with special needs who had speech and language disorders. She began as an “Instructional/Speech Aide” at Pasadena Unified School District working with children with moderate and severe intellectual disabilities. All the students she worked with had speech and language disorders, and, since the Districts therapy was overloaded Keaunna implemented the communication goals she wrote. Based on that experience and many others, Keaunna decided to enroll at Cal State Los Angeles to pursue her professional career in teaching. She received her Master’s in Mild-Moderate Disabilities in Special Education from Cal State Los Angeles and a second

As a leader in a deployed environment, have you ever asked yourself the question, “I’m over here risking my life for these people, why aren’t they helping us find the bad guys?”, or “why can’t these people understand that we could complete this great project for them but they aren’t interested in helping themselves?!”, if so, then you likely found yourself looking across an empathy gap. Time and again we have failed in engagements due to an inability to take the perspective of other individuals. We have all seen examples of that young platoon leader engaging with local leaders in a disrespectful and counterproductive manner. As a lieutenant in Iraq during OIF I, I walked into engagements the exact same way, heavy-handed, dictatorial, and uninterested

There are more than 100,000 Speech-Language Pathologists in the Unites States, 70% of which find themselves employed in elementary or secondary schools. Since the 1950’s, speech teachers have worked with children to improve their speaking or hearing disabilities as well as struggled with the size of their caseload and workload. Groups and organizations have made efforts to solve this problem; none have been fruitful. This is caused by a lack of adequate backing or support. Speech-Language Pathologists employed in schools face many difficulties concerning caseload and workload, including general issues, caseload stress, student placement, and even job shortages.

Nevertheless, put aside of the attributes I possess, I am unable to separate empathy from sympathy. I am a very emotional person. But human service providers should have the ability of not being affected by clients’ emotions beyond understanding. Otherwise, the helping professional will not only be burned out easily, but also unable to solve customers’ problems effectively. Thus, I will keep working on distinguish empathy, which is being understanding, from sympathy, which is putting myself in the client’s positions.

The introduction of Whitmire’s journal starts at the beginning of speech pathology nearly 100 years ago. Since then, the job description has changed, along with standards and resources available for speech pathologists. By comparing and contrasting the caseload composition of today and of fifty years ago, she brings to light how many more students speech pathologists have become responsible for teaching. Whitmire also identifies the IDEA Amendments that were created to lessen the burden on speech teachers and improve the rehabilitation of students requiring special education. While Kathleen introduces methods of identifying children with special needs and analyzing their individual requirements of care, she is also informing the reader of how much work goes into helping these children.

Based on the responsibilities and duties of speech-language pathologists, they require specific skills and expertise in language to enable them deliver to their clients effectively. First and foremost, they need good and strong interpersonal skills. Unlike other fields or professions, the relationship between pathologist and patients is quite significant. Teamwork and cooperation are, therefore, necessary. They both work together to ensure the speech problem is remediated. Ideally, interpersonal skills enable effective, clear and positive communication between the two thereby ensuring a strong partnership grows toward achieving a particular goal. Besides, strong interpersonal skills enhance

Speech Language Pathologists work with a variety of clients with different demographics. Volunteering at Press on Youth Center has exposed me to youth from different backgrounds. Communication disorders can affect an adolescent’s emotional, social, and academic success in life. I noticed that students at the youth center had various articulation disorders, and behavioral issues that affected the