Interrupting With Care: Empathic Redirection in Clinical Conversations as a Patient-Centered Communication Strategy

Patient-centered communication emphasizes empathy, reflective listening, and open exploration. However, clinicians may perceive a conversation as increasingly repetitive, tangential, or distress-amplifying and be uncertain about how to redirect it. Empathic redirection is defined as a deliberate communication strategy developed and taught at Mayo Clinic in which a clinician respectfully interrupts, demonstrates understanding, and collaboratively redirects conversation toward a shared goal. Existing research has largely examined premature interruption of patients’ opening statements. This literature cautions against interrupting before patients have had an opportunity to express their concerns, but less attention has been given to how clinicians can respectfully redirect conversation after sufficient listening has occurred and a change in conversational direction is judged to be appropriate. Drawing on Motivational Interviewing (MI), reflective listening, agenda-setting, interruption research, and literature on rumination, this paper describes a five-part approach: orient attention, ask permission, reflect, legitimize when appropriate, and redirect toward a shared goal. Empathic redirection is presented as a practice-informed, theoretically grounded communication framework whose effects require empirical evaluation.