Greater professional empathy leads to higher agreement about decisions made in the consultation

Interesting study about empathy in the consultation process.  See the article at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0738399114001827
In the study, empathic responses to statements of challenge were found to be a strong predictor of agreement and resulted in both parties reporting and agreeing on more decisions. 
In particular, I liked the fact that empathy can be communicated by simply acknowledging the other. 

The inevitability of physician burnout: Implications for interventions

For physicians, burnout is the inevitable consequence of the way that medical education is organised and the subsequent maladaptive behaviours that are reinforced in healthcare organisations via the hidden curriculum. Thus, burnout is an important indicator of how the organisation itself is functioning. I have written a paper about the issue;
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213058614000084
A central theme of paper is the degree to which the organisational systems are responsible for the disconnect between performance and physician health. Healthcare pays considerable ‘lip-service’ to systems approaches, but in practice it valorises the role of the individual physician in terms of both success and failure. Thus, this contradiction needs to be addressed.