Research directions
Patient outcome of physician empathy in cancer care and chronic diseases.
In chronic diseases such as cancer, patients have many encounters with physicians. These encounters are important for decision-making regarding treatments. They are also important for patients to feel supported by their physicians while being physically and psychologically vulnerable due to disease treatments and uncertainty regarding the future.
Our research interest is to establish whether physician empathy can ameliorate patient outcomes such as quality of life (Lelorain et al, 2018a), survival (Lelorain et al., 2018b, Mulliri, Lelorain et al., 2022, https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/11/e066559) and complications after a surgery (Gehenne, Lelorain et al., 2021). In order to answer properly to these questions, empathy must be defined and assessed correctly (Gehenne, Lelorain et al., 2020, Lelorain 2021) and it is important to figure out under which conditions the positive effect can occur: for example is it true for all types of empathy, for all patients and throughout the disease trajectory or not?
In this line of research, we performed a meta-analysis on the link between physician empathy and patient outcomes in cancer care (Lelorain, Gehenne, Christophe et Duprez, Psychooncology, 2023 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36694295/).
Patients' and caregivers' motivation for and hindrance to Patient Education
Therapeutic education (TE) is a set of organized, multidisciplinary activities designed to help patients manage their chronic disease on a daily basis. These activities are medical (understanding the disease and treatments, adherence to treatment), social (managing one's social and professional life with one's disease) and psychological (managing the various emotions related to the impairements and uncertainty generated by the disease).
These activities are often organized by hospital caregivers and can be destabilizing for them, who are not always used to such a patient-centered approach. We are therefore seeking to understand the difficulties faced by caregivers in this innovative approach (Lelorain et al., 2017, 2019, Untas, Lelorain et al., 2019) as well as those of patients in participating in these activities. Indeed, while patient education improves patients' health and quality of life, many patients however refuse to participate. We therefore seek to understand the reasons for this (Lelorain,...,Bourgoin, in preparation:a longitudinal study carried out on 450 patients) and to test the most attractive programs possible (Deruelle, Lelorain et al, 2020, Lelorain,...& Duprez, accepted in Psycho-oncologie).
