Dr Cylene Yang is a medical doctor exploring the role of graphic medicine in increasing empathy in healthcare.

Rush Omen: a comic to promote empathy in healthcare professionals

Noticing their own erosion of empathy as a junior doctor, Cylene Yang has developed the risograph medical comic ‘Rush Omen’ to evaluate whether a comic with a multi-perspective story could be an effective medium to promote empathy awareness for healthcare professionals.

Adopting layout, narrative & conceptual mechanisms from Manga and western comics, ‘Rush Omen’ tells the same story from three points of view: nurse in orange, doctor in teal, and patient in cyan.

Using an adapted empathy survey, a pool of clinical practitioners provided promising feedback after reading the comic, which suggests that this approach might raise awareness of a drop in empathy across in-group and out-group relationships.