Empathy: The Heart of Trust
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September 28, 2026
“This is all very true,” one patient’s wife said as Dr. Marlise Pierre-Wright gathered her research materials. “A person’s history of trauma does affect their health.” She smiled gently and added, almost as an afterthought, “You know – he went through something very difficult when he was 21.”
“My dad was murdered on the streets,” the patient said. “I’ll never forget it.”
He was in his nineties. There were tears in his eyes.
“Thank you for asking.”
Dr. Pierre-Wright, an academic general internist and the Co-Medical Director of the Complex High Admission Management Program (CHAMP), at Northwestern Medicine, shared this encounter in “Dispatches from an Unlikely Resident PI: Becoming a Better Doctor Through MedEd Research” published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. It captures something at the center of her work at Northwestern: when clinicians understand how trauma can shape a person’s health and experiences with the health care system, they can respond to patients with more empathy and build better relationships grounded in trust.
With support from the Building Trust: Advancing Health Equity grant program, Dr. Pierre-Wright developed the Be Trauma I.N.F.O.R.M.E.D simulation curriculum, which is now integrated into the training of all postgraduate year 1 internal medicine residents at Northwestern. The toolkit built into the curriculum is also available for other training programs to use.
The curriculum responded to the need she identified among internal medicine residents for practical skills they could use when caring for patients who had experienced trauma.
“Oftentimes I would see patients more recently on the wards after they have transferred out of the ICU and they share with me how traumatic those experiences were. And the only thing that I can offer to them is to talk to psychiatry or psychology or the chaplain,” one resident shared in a recently published paper.
Designed for internal medicine residents working in inpatient settings, the curriculum helps trainees learn and apply core concepts of trauma-informed care through simulated patient encounters. Dr. Pierre-Wright assessed residents before and after the intervention to understand whether the training changed how they communicated with patients. The results speak to the program’s success.
“When the results came in, I danced in my kitchen,” she shared. “Residents who completed the curriculum showed greater improvement in trauma-informed communication than controls. In focus groups, they described feeling more confident and intentional when responding to patients’ disclosures of trauma.”
The work has grown well beyond the initial curriculum. The project engaged more than 150 patients, 70 internal medicine residents, and interdisciplinary team members with expertise in trauma-informed care. The team has presented its findings at seven national and regional conferences, earned first place in an oral presentation competition, and published six articles with three more publications pending.
But perhaps the clearest measure of the project’s impact can be found in the patient who, in his nineties, was finally asked about an experience he had carried with him since he was 21.
Dr. Pierre-Wright’s work demonstrates the concrete role empathy can play in building trust between physicians and patients. Through the curriculum, Northwestern residents develop trauma-informed care skills that can help them better understand and respond to patients’ experiences. Clinician by clinician, Dr. Pierre-Wright is preparing the next generation of internal medicine physicians to combine expertise with the empathy, care, and concern that makes medicine a deeply meaningful – and truly human – experience.
Dr. Pierre-Wright would like to acknowledge her team for their support in making this work possible: Revika Singh, MD, Uma Thachapuzha, BA, Ibrahim Mokhtar, BA, Yash Chakraborty, BA and her mentors Dr. Muriel Jean Jacques, MD and Aashish Didwania, MD.
