Empathy: A “zone of uncertainty” in mediated healthcare practice

The paper investigates empathic behaviour in the context of linguistically mediated healthcare communication. By preliminarily addressing the issue in terms of professional ethics and from the dual perspective of both medical and interpreting practice, the study analyses two encounters taking place in an Italian family planning clinic. These involve Italian-speaking healthcare providers, a Russian-speaking mediator, and two undocumented immigrant women; one from Ukraine enquiring about fertility tests, and one from Estonia requesting a voluntary termination of pregnancy. Given the lack, in the Italian context, of nationally recognized standards of practice and of centralized training and accreditation programmes, cultural mediation can safely be described as an ill-defined occupation. The contention here is that one of the major “zones of uncertainty” accounting for the instability of this professional field is empathic conduct. Albeit within the narrow confines of the present study, the qualitative analysis of interactional data would seem to indicate that, far from clashing with the medical goal of responding appropriately to a patient’s problem, empathy may be functionally and successfully used both to show compassion to a human being in need and to complete the institutional task at hand.