Empathy, Difficulty, Difference: Creative Curiosity in Practice
Lead Research Organisation:
UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER
Abstract
This project critically responds to urgent concerns about the erosion of empathy within health systems – and makes the case for the literary arts as a means to help healthcare practitioners and teams.
The alarming and ongoing decline in empathy in healthcare systems has been increasingly linked to professional burnout, communication failures, and systemic inequality, as highlighted by the Francis Report (2013) and the Ockendon Review (2022), representing a major vulnerability in national health systems. Yet the Department of Health and Social Care’s Areas of Research Interest and the “Fit for the Future” Health Plan for England (2025) emphasise the importance of retention, wellbeing, and innovation in workforce development. This project builds on mounting evidence that the literary arts are crucial to this endeavour and offer powerful means of fostering understanding, perspective-taking and listening skills (Charon, 2006; Levett-Jones, 2024). It seeks to learn from historical research into literary empathy, and from current successful creative health initiatives, including local partner-organisations Word! and BrightSparks Arts. Our project team brings strengths in literary research, creative practice, medical education and healthcare communication together to convene an interdisciplinary dialogue.
Our central aim is to explore how engaging with literature can foster empathic communication and self-care, and to investigate how this might be applied in highly-pressured, diverse healthcare environments. We have four research questions:
1. How can we learn from different historical, conceptual, critical, cross-cultural and methodological approaches to literature and empathy?
2. How can we learn from existing successful creative health interventions in difficult situations to deal with other related healthcare questions? eg. staff demotivation/demoralisation.
3. How can we put literary interventions for empathy into practice in healthcare settings?
4. How might we develop public interest in this research, and develop a future large-scale co-created bid?
Working in collaboration with our partner-organisations, we will produce four linked workstreams to investigate this question:
1. Research symposia will allow us to frame, explore, and co-create key research and methodological questions drawn from different disciplines, periods, and practices (RQ1-3);
2. Creative workshops will put academics, researchers on healthcare management and policy, healthcare practitioners and NHS managers into dialogue with creative practitioners working in the community to share lived experience and co-create practical interventions (RQ1-3);
3. Public engagement A public lecture series (in collaboration with Literary Leicester) will feature high-profile authors, including Dr Gwen Adshead, Dr Benji Waterhouse, and Professor Kit de Waal, whose work is deeply engaged with empathy and its failures. Our podcast, Shelf Care, alongside creative commissions, will ensure our research is accessible to a wide audience, with a digital legacy. (RQ4)
4. Future directions A grant-writing workshop and writing retreat will build on and publish initial findings and develop a further iteration of the bid. (RQ4)
Guided by an Action Research methodology and the Creative Health Quality Framework, the project will prioritise co-creation, ethical engagement, and iterative reflection; it will have immediate and long-term impacts across academic, clinical, and public domains. It will enrich our theoretical and practical understandings of the connection between literature and empathy, and support policy innovation in healthcare.
References
Rita Charon, Narrative medicine: Honoring the stories of illness (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Tracy Levett-Jones, et al. ‘Use and effectiveness of the arts for enhancing healthcare students' empathy skills: A mixed methods systematic review’, Nurse Education Today, 138(2024) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2024.106185.
The alarming and ongoing decline in empathy in healthcare systems has been increasingly linked to professional burnout, communication failures, and systemic inequality, as highlighted by the Francis Report (2013) and the Ockendon Review (2022), representing a major vulnerability in national health systems. Yet the Department of Health and Social Care’s Areas of Research Interest and the “Fit for the Future” Health Plan for England (2025) emphasise the importance of retention, wellbeing, and innovation in workforce development. This project builds on mounting evidence that the literary arts are crucial to this endeavour and offer powerful means of fostering understanding, perspective-taking and listening skills (Charon, 2006; Levett-Jones, 2024). It seeks to learn from historical research into literary empathy, and from current successful creative health initiatives, including local partner-organisations Word! and BrightSparks Arts. Our project team brings strengths in literary research, creative practice, medical education and healthcare communication together to convene an interdisciplinary dialogue.
Our central aim is to explore how engaging with literature can foster empathic communication and self-care, and to investigate how this might be applied in highly-pressured, diverse healthcare environments. We have four research questions:
1. How can we learn from different historical, conceptual, critical, cross-cultural and methodological approaches to literature and empathy?
2. How can we learn from existing successful creative health interventions in difficult situations to deal with other related healthcare questions? eg. staff demotivation/demoralisation.
3. How can we put literary interventions for empathy into practice in healthcare settings?
4. How might we develop public interest in this research, and develop a future large-scale co-created bid?
Working in collaboration with our partner-organisations, we will produce four linked workstreams to investigate this question:
1. Research symposia will allow us to frame, explore, and co-create key research and methodological questions drawn from different disciplines, periods, and practices (RQ1-3);
2. Creative workshops will put academics, researchers on healthcare management and policy, healthcare practitioners and NHS managers into dialogue with creative practitioners working in the community to share lived experience and co-create practical interventions (RQ1-3);
3. Public engagement A public lecture series (in collaboration with Literary Leicester) will feature high-profile authors, including Dr Gwen Adshead, Dr Benji Waterhouse, and Professor Kit de Waal, whose work is deeply engaged with empathy and its failures. Our podcast, Shelf Care, alongside creative commissions, will ensure our research is accessible to a wide audience, with a digital legacy. (RQ4)
4. Future directions A grant-writing workshop and writing retreat will build on and publish initial findings and develop a further iteration of the bid. (RQ4)
Guided by an Action Research methodology and the Creative Health Quality Framework, the project will prioritise co-creation, ethical engagement, and iterative reflection; it will have immediate and long-term impacts across academic, clinical, and public domains. It will enrich our theoretical and practical understandings of the connection between literature and empathy, and support policy innovation in healthcare.
References
Rita Charon, Narrative medicine: Honoring the stories of illness (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Tracy Levett-Jones, et al. ‘Use and effectiveness of the arts for enhancing healthcare students' empathy skills: A mixed methods systematic review’, Nurse Education Today, 138(2024) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2024.106185.