Acknowledgement: The Antidote to Skillification (of Empathy) in Health Professions Education

Health Professions Education (HPE) is rightly concerned with the fostering of empathic communication. Empathy is all about connection and attentive listening, which, in the midst of life and death, elucidates the frailty and complexity of human existence. However, medical educators often define empathy in order to teach and test it—what we term ‘skillification.' In skillifying empathy, medical educators turn an elusive humane concept to a behavioural tick-box exercise contributing to empathic dissonance and fake empathy. The skillification of empathy provides a case study for interrogating the skillification of communication and connection more broadly. Skillification turns possible transformative learning into zombie-like behaviour and gaming the system—functionally robbing medical students the opportunity to question the meaning of humane connection in moments of disruption. We present Michael Hyde's philosophical notion of acknowledgement as a way through the skillification trap. We see an opening to reconceptualize connection in medical education, not as a behavioural skill that must be demonstrated for competency's sake, but as an ethical way of being with others. Acknowledgement redirects us towards an ethics-driven paradigm of communicative action, which medical educators can cultivate by reconsidering skillification, exploring complexity, dialoguing with the patient voice, and fostering acknowledgement between teachers and learners.