Empathy among Medical Students Studying Different Curricula: A Comparative Study

Imran, Shezadi Sabah; Umer, Ariba; Khan, Asifa; Bibi, Bushra; Zainab, Aqsa; Rahim, Anam

doi:10.37185/lns.1.1.172

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Using the TEQ and other tools, Bhatia G et al in India and Imran SS et al in Pakistan also concluded that empathy scores according to TEQ decline as the year progresses [17,23]. The low degree of empathy among medical students and its decline as their medical education advances has been a source of worry in several research.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empathy Levels in Medical Students: A Single Center Study

Baig¹,

Hayat²,

Khan³

et al. 2023

Cureus

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To determine the level of empathy in medical students and to determine the difference in empathy levels between the two genders in a single center. Materials & methodsThis qualitative study was conducted at a medical college in Peshawar from March 2021 to July 2021. Institutional ethical committee approval was taken (RMI/RMI-REC/Approval/83) before commencing the study. All students admitted into the medical college in the current academic year 2020 to 2021 were included in the study. Any students that did not fill out the questionnaire completely were excluded. The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) was used in this study. The questionnaire was uploaded on google forms for data collection. All the resulting scores were entered into IBM SPSS version 23.0. The mean TEQ score was calculated. Box and whisker plots were made for respective years. An Independent sample t-test was used to determine the association between mean TEQ scores and gender. ResultsOf 367 students, 347 (94.6%) participated in this study, with a slight female predominance (53%). The mean age of the students was 21.44 (SD = 1.751) years. The participation rate was ≥70% from each class. Most participants across the years have an above-average empathy score (49.9%). Among the participants, the year I (67.6%) showed most participants with high empathy. Year IV (40.6%) has the highest proportion of below-average empathy scores. The mean empathy score of female students was 49.08 (S.D = 7.588), while the empathy score for male students was 44.59 (S.D = 7.58). ConclusionEmpathy levels decline as medical education is progressed through the years. Females show a greater sense of empathy than their male counterparts. A slight increase in empathy levels is seen in the final year of medical school after a decline over the initial years.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%