Communication skills training and the conceptual structure of empathy among medical students

Abstract

IntroductionMedical and healthcare professionals’ empathy for patients is crucially important for patient care. Some studies have suggested that a significant decline in empathy occurs during clinical training years in medical school as documented by self-assessed empathy scales. Moreover, a recent study provided qualitative evidence that communication skills training in an examination context, such as in an objective structured clinical examination, might stimulate perspective taking but inhibit the development of compassionate care. Therefore, the current study examined how perspective taking and compassionate care relate to medical students’ willingness to show empathic behaviour and how these relations may change with communication skills training.MethodsA total of 295 fourth-year Japanese medical students from three universities completed the Jefferson Empathy Scale and a newly developed set of items on willingness to show empathic behaviour twice after communication skills training, pertaining to post-training and retrospectively for pre-training.ResultsThe findings indicate that students’ willingness to show empathic behaviour is much more correlated with perspective taking than with compassionate care. Qualitative descriptive analysis of open-ended question responses revealed a difficulty of feeling compassion despite showing empathic behaviour.DiscussionThese findings shed light on the conceptual structure of empathy among medical students and generate a number of hypotheses for future intervention and longitudinal studies on the relation between communication skills training and empathy.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s40037-018-0431-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

A systematic scoping review of approaches to teaching and assessing empathy in medicine

“…• Improvement in self-rated empathy scores using validated scales [ 1 , 4 , 8 , 9 , 11 , 16 , 19 , 47 – 49 , 52 , 60 , 61 , 65 , 68 , 71 – 73 , 75 , 78 , 79 , 82 , 87 , 90 , 94 – 96 , 100 , 104 , 106 , 108 , 110 , 114 , 121 , 123 , 124 , 127 , 132 , 137 , 141 ]…”

Effects of Loving-Kindness Meditation on Doctors’ Mindfulness, Empathy, and Communication Skills

“…The current medical education system focuses mainly on medical skill education, and humanistic education is insufficient, which can lead to a low sense of responsibility, lack of patience and compassion, and poor service attitude among medical staff. In medical services, medical personnel who master the medical professional knowledge and skills, and patients who have little medical knowledge, form a special and unequal interpersonal relationship [ 13 ]. Due to the imbalance of medical information between doctors and patients, medical personnel are in a dominant position regarding medical information and disease diagnosis and treatment, whereas patients are in a relatively inferior position.…”

Empathy levels decline and sex differences in medicine students from the Caribbean

“…given its complexity (2,3,10,11,(15)(16)(17), it is important to emphasize that it is the characteristics of the phenomenon that must determine the type, form and contents of an intervention. As a consequence, the purposes of such intervention are: First, to achieve high levels of empathy in the students and second, that the changes produced in the brain of the students persist in time.…”

“…Also, the development of empathy is not complete until the young adult stage is completed (approximately 25 years of age), it is still possible for health science students to learn empathy during their medical student years. (13)(14)(15) In fact, the undergraduate medical years may be crucial and a final opportunity for budding clinicians to receive training in the empathetic skills useful in 16) Therefore, the academic study of empathy consists of examining its components separately, while keeping a focus on its structure and manifestation as an integral character trait. (17,18) Most empirical studies that have measured clinical empathy in undergraduate medical students have assessed two factors: gender and academic courses or years.…”

“…States medical students (13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21), preceded by a systematic increase in levels of empathy between the first and third years; this observed decline begins in the third year and continues from the fourth year onwards. Declination is the (observable) effect and the erosion of empathy is its cause.…”