UC San Diego recently released the news of a new institution on campus: the T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion. The institution will study the neurological components of empathy and compassion, along with their relation to burnouts within doctors.
Denny Sanford, a philanthropist and businessman, is responsible for a generous donation and hopes that it will make a profound impact in the field of science. This is not Sanford’s first donation to the UCSD medical program. In 2013, he donated $100 million, which produced the UCSD Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Center. Sanford has also helped in the creation of medical facilities for children in South Dakota, Minnesota, and Florida. The rest of the funding for the institution, however, will be fulfilled by the $2 billion fundraising campaign that UCSD started in 2012.
The medical professionals and experts who will be working in the institute will study empathy and compassion in order to develop techniques that will not only improve the health of doctors, but of their patients as well. In addition, the institute also hopes to find methods that will combat doctor burnout.
After the results of 2019 surveys, 44 percent of 15,000 professionals experienced burnout, and 15 percent revealed that they were experiencing depression as well. Furthermore, the American Psychiatry Association reported that doctors have the highest suicide rate of any profession.
The institute will work in partnership with UC San Diego’s student-run health clinic to alleviate the stress of current doctors. The student-run health clinic has been giving care to San Diego residents since 1997.
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