Schwartz Rounds for Higher Education Institutions

Health professional students are asked to absorb an extraordinary amount, not just academically, but emotionally. From their first clinical encounters, they begin navigating situations that most people never face: witnessing suffering, delivering difficult news, confronting mortality.

The Schwartz Rounds^® program gives students a regular, facilitated space to process these experiences together. Sessions are built around stories and themes that resonate across roles, led by trained facilitators and grounded in the kind of honest reflection that helps people stay connected to compassionate care.

Health professional students are expected to learn, perform, and keep moving, with little opportunity to pause and reflect. Burnout risk runs high. The data shows:

Medical students report significantly higher rates of burnout, depression, and anxiety than their peers in other graduate programs, with burnout prevalence estimates ranging from 27% to 75% depending on year of training and institution.¹
Distress tends to peak during the clinical years, when students are most exposed to patient suffering and least supported by structured reflection.²
Many students report a decline in empathy as training progresses, not because they care less, but because their environment gives them no way to process what they’re experiencing.³

Left unaddressed, these pressures don’t stay contained to students’ personal lives. They shape the kind of clinicians students become. Evidence suggests that attending Schwartz Rounds sessions as a student promotes a career-long approach to professional life that includes reflection on and processing of the emotional impact of work in health and care.

“I was shaped professionally by the openness of senior colleagues when reflecting on the emotional and psychological impact of their work. I felt encouraged by their openness and vulnerability… I found courage to be more accepting of my own humanity and difficult feelings I encountered in my practice… I am now a Schwartz facilitator and remain passionate about the power of storytelling. I think we all need more compassionate, safe spaces where we can draw on the collective strength of our workforce through sharing, listening and responding to staff stories.” – A student participant

The Solution: The Schwartz Rounds Program

Healthcare and social services schools are already invested in training technically excellent healthcare workers. The Schwartz Rounds program addresses something that technical training alone can’t: the emotional formation of a caregiver.

The program creates a structured, facilitated space for students to step back from the pace of training and talk honestly about what they’re experiencing: the cases that stay with them, the moments of uncertainty, the tension between what they feel and what they think they’re supposed to feel. These aren’t therapy sessions or debriefs. They’re conversations that help students make sense of the human side of caregiving.

Crucially, the Schwartz Rounds program bring together students, residents, attending physicians, nurses, and other staff in the same room. The opportunity to see experienced clinicians speak openly about the emotional weight of their work may be one of the most powerful things a student can witness.

“I feel more courage…it’s actually kind of inspiring…I’m about to go on placement tomorrow, to intensive care, so there’s a lot of things that I’m keeping in my mind from the Schwartz Rounds.” – A student participant

Students who participated in Schwartz Rounds programs report:

93%

said the program enhanced their insight and self-awareness.

82%

said the sessions gave them insight into how others feel/think about caring for patients.

NUMBER

DATA HERE

Benefits of the Schwartz Rounds Program

The Schwartz Rounds program has a 30-year track record in healthcare settings, with strong evidence of reduced stress, improved teamwork, and sustained compassion. More than 100 research studies on the program have shown significant benefits, including several focused on health education settings. In education specifically, the program has been shown to help students:

Feel less isolated in their emotional responses to clinical work
Develop greater self-awareness about how their experiences affect their practice
Build connection across roles and years of training
Maintain empathy through the pressures of clinical education

Built for the Interprofessional Classroom

Healthcare is delivered by teams, not individuals — yet most health professions students train in silos. The Schwartz Rounds program gives institutions a structured way to bring students together across disciplines before they reach the workplace, building a shared language for the emotional and ethical realities of caregiving early.

When nursing, medical, social work, pharmacy, and allied health students reflect together on a shared case:

Students hear how other disciplines think. Different professional lenses on the same case build professional empathy fast.
Hierarchy flattens. There’s no “right answer” to defend, so students speak with equal weight regardless of training level.
Students rehearse vulnerability early. Learning to say “that case affected me” in front of future colleagues makes it more likely they’ll do so as practicing clinicians.
Shared values surface before shared workflows. Students find common ground before they’re collaborating on real patient care.

A Concrete Answer to IPE Requirements

IPE is a mandate for most health professions programs — CAIPE, IPEC competencies, and accreditors expect documented, structured interprofessional experience, not just co-located classes. Schwartz Rounds meets that mandate without requiring institutions to build something from scratch:

Structured and repeatable: trained facilitators, a consistent format, easy to document for accreditation.
Built-in outcomes data on empathy, teamwork, and burnout, so institutions don’t need to generate their own pilot evidence.
Fits existing scheduling as a co-curricular or credit-bearing requirement across multiple programs at once.
Scales with the institution: same format for one cohort or a university-wide rollout.

The Business Case

The case for well-being programming in medical education has never been stronger, or more urgent. Accreditation bodies increasingly expect institutions to demonstrate that student well-being is embedded in the culture of training, not just addressed reactively.

More fundamentally, schools have a responsibility to graduate caregivers who are not just competent but sustainable, and capable of sustaining compassion over a long career. The Schwartz Rounds program is one of the most evidence-based tools available for building that capacity from the earliest years of training.

They don’t require overhauling a curriculum. They require protected time, trained facilitation, and a clear institutional message that the emotional experience of becoming a caregiver matters.

Video Gallery

Check out these videos to see how some higher education institutions have implemented the Schwartz Rounds program.

An Animation Explainer: Schwartz Rounds for Students

This short video from the University of Liverpool explains what the Schwartz Rounds program for Higher Education students is all about.

Watch on YouTube

Why Should Students Attend Schwartz Rounds?

This film was created by students at the University of Brighton.

Watch on YouTube

University Schwartz Rounds: Supporting Students

A short animation introducing Schwartz Rounds in a University setting, explaining what Schwartz Rounds are and how students may benefit from attending.

Watch on YouTube

Lead with Compassion

If your organization is interested in joining our healthcare community, please complete the brief inquiry form and a Schwartz Center staff member will get back to you with next steps.

Join Us

Additional Resources

References

Nebhinani N, Kuppili PP; Mamta 3. Stress, Burnout, and Coping among First-Year Medical Undergraduates. J Neurosci Rural Pract. 2021 Jul;12(3):483-489. doi: 10.1055/s-0041-1727576. Epub 2021 May 10. PMID: 34295102; PMCID: PMC8289521.
Saali A, Stanislawski ER, Kumar V, Chan C, Hurtado A, Pietrzak RH, Charney DS, Ripp J, Katz CL. The Psychiatric Burden on Medical Students in New York City Entering Clinical Clerkships During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Psychiatr Q. 2022 Jun;93(2):419-434. doi: 10.1007/s11126-021-09955-2. Epub 2021 Oct 7. PMID: 34618278; PMCID: PMC8495188.
Neumann M, Edelhäuser F, Tauschel D, Fischer MR, Wirtz M, Woopen C, Haramati A, Scheffer C. Empathy decline and its reasons: a systematic review of studies with medical students and residents. Acad Med. 2011 Aug;86(8):996-1009. doi: 10.1097/ACM.0b013e318221e615. PMID: 21670661.
Stocker, C., Cooney, A., Thomas, P., Kumaravel, B., Langlands, K., & Hearn, J. (2018). Schwartz rounds in undergraduate medical education facilitates active reflection and individual identification of learning need. MedEdPublish, 7(4). https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2018.0000230.1
Gleeson, D., Arwyn-Jones, J., Awan, M., White, I., & Halse, O. (2020). Medical Student Schwartz Rounds: A Powerful Medium for Medical Student Reflective Practice. Advances in Medical Education and Practice, Volume 11, 775–780. https://doi.org/10.2147/amep.s273181
Hamilton, D., Taylor, C., & Maben, J. (2023). How Does a Group Reflection Intervention (Schwartz Rounds) Work within Healthcare Undergraduate Settings? A Realist Review. Perspectives on Medical Education, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/pme.930
Abnett, H., Tuckwell, R., & Evans, L. (2022). Early introduction of the multi-disciplinary team through student Schwartz Rounds: a mixed methodology study. BMC Medical Education, 22(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-022-03549-7
Clancy, D., Mitchell, A., & Smart, C. (2019). A qualitative exploration of the experiences of students attending interprofessional Schwartz Rounds in a University context. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/13561820.2019.1692797
Corless, I. B., Theresa Hoskins Michel, Nicholas, M., Jameson, D., Purtilo, R. B., & Dirkes, A. M. A. (2009). Educating Health Professions Students About the Issues Involved in Communicating Effectively: A Novel Approach. 48(7), 367–373. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20090615-03
Gishen, F., Whitman, S., Gill, D., Barker, R., & Walker, S. (2016). Schwartz Centre Rounds: a new initiative in the undergraduate curriculum—what do medical students think? BMC Medical Education, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-016-0762-6
Smith, J., Stewart, M. G., Foggin, E., Mathews, S., Harris, J., Thomas, P., Cooney, A., & Stocker, C. J. (2020). Assessing the benefits and usefulness of Schwartz Centre rounds in second-year medical students using clinical educator-facilitated group work session: not just “a facilitated moan”!. BMC Medical Education, 20(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-020-02199-x

More research can be found on our Schwartz Rounds Research page.