“The Elephant in the Waiting Room” is a 7-minute film produced by The Empathy Project.
Lights, Camera, Empathy! Sign up for a workshop on how to use The Elephant in the Waiting Room, an animated film curriculum, to foster empathy, improve team dynamics, and enhance human-centered care.
Learn how to teach The Elephant in the Waiting Roomto students or fellow faculty members in this special workshop for Gold Partners Council members, led by Dr. Jennifer Adams and Dr. Cristina M. Gonzalez of NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
We held two workshops in 2025. Stay tuned for the next workshop!
Fill out the form at the bottom of this page to be notified when the next workshop is announced.
Each workshop is limited to 20 people. It will not be recorded.
Empathy is the intentional practice of authentically understanding another person’s lived experience through engaged curiosity. It has been consistently linked to improved patient health outcomes, higher patient satisfaction, and greater workplace fulfillment for healthcare providers. Despite compelling evidence that empathy is a vital, teachable, and measurable competency, developing training programs that are engaging, practical, and feasible within clinical care contexts remains a challenge.
This master class introduces an innovative and practical training resource designed to build empathy skills in ways that are directly relevant to current and future healthcare professionals. The train-the-trainer model will prepare participants to use our curriculum, which is open sourced, within their home intuitions. The curriculum is adaptable, easily disseminated, and has shown promising evidence of effectiveness in numerous settings.
This class is ideal for clinician educators, faculty, and staff who provide educational training for healthcare professionals and students. It can be adapted for all learning levels and upon completion a full faculty guide, power point and link to video will be provided.
Educational Goals:
Understand Empathy’s Impact: Explore how empathy improves patient outcomes, enhances team dynamics, and supports healthcare professional and student well-being.
Engage in Hands-On Learning: Participate in an interactive curriculum that builds practical empathy skills for real-world application.
Deepen Empathy through Reflection: Develop skills in perspective-taking, engaged curiosity, deep listening, and self-awareness through guided reflection.
Integrate Empathy Training: Discover creative strategies for adapting empathy training to various professional settings.
Collaborate for Change: Brainstorm actionable strategies with peers to implement empathy-focused initiatives in your institution.
Access Valuable Resources: Receive open-source curriculum materials and an animated film designed to support empathy training in healthcare and home environments.
About The Empathy Project
The Empathy Project is based on the premise that a good interpersonal relationship between patient and caregiver is critical to excellent medical care. Located within NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the project promotes a culture of empathy in medicine— training healthcare professionals to be more humane and effective and educating patients to expect and ask for it.
The Empathy Project centers on narrative stories, high-quality short films, and interactive experiences to reflect important and emerging issues between patients and clinicians and among care teams. These learning tools are integrated into medical school and residency curriculum and trainings. The Center for Empathy in Medicine works in close partnership with The Empathy Project, developing a workforce of expert educators who can teach and assess empathy, establish a robust research program to evaluate the impact of these efforts, and define best practices in empathy education within an academic health center.
The Empathy Project brings together leaders in medicine, education, technology, research, and entertainment with the shared goal of improving the health and well-being of communities across New York City, working to decrease health disparities, and serving as a model in empathy education, research, and practice for medical schools nationally.
About the Instructors
Dr. Jennifer Adams
Jennifer G. Adams, MD, is the inaugural Frankfort Family Director of the Center for Empathy in Medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Director of the Primary Care Residency Track, and a preceptor and attending physician at Gouverneur Health.
Dr. Adams brings deep expertise as a clinician, educator, and researcher to her leadership of the Center, where she is dedicated to advancing empathy as a foundational element of medical education. She works closely with leaders across the educational and clinical missions to design, implement, and evaluate a comprehensive empathy curriculum spanning undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education. A frequent speaker on empathetic healthcare, Dr. Adams has shared her work nationally and internationally and is committed to improving empathy training on a global scale.
Dr. Cristina Gonzalez
Cristina M. Gonzalez, M.D., M.Ed., is Professor of Medicine and Population Health and Associate Director—Medical Education—Institute for Excellence in Health Equity at New York University Grossman School of Medicine. An alumna of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, she completed internal medicine residency at New York Presbyterian Hospital- Weill Cornell Medical Center, and medical education research fellowship at University of Cincinnati, earning a Master’s Degree in Medical Education. She was selected as a Scholar in the Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a Scholar in the Macy Faculty Scholars Program of the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. These prestigious awards launched her research program designing, implementing, and evaluating interventions seeking to improve physicians’ abilities to address the impact of implicit bias in clinical encounters. Her lab developed the patient-informed framework of Implicit Bias Recognition and Management (IBRM).
Dr. Gonzalez is an internationally renowned expert in the development of skills-based, behavioral interventions in IBRM for physicians across the continuum of training and practice. In 2019 she was awarded NIH funding from the National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities. Her lab was the first to develop calibrated, high-fidelity simulations that precipitate the influence of racial implicit bias to study the efficacy of future IBRM interventions on physician communication skills and patient outcomes. Subsequently, through funding from the National Academy of Medicine and the Council for Medical Specialty Societies, her lab advanced the study of the diagnostic process to contribute to diagnostic equity. In 2025 her team received the Stemmler Grant to advance the science of assessment of communication skills through a health equity lens.
