A Study on Clinical Empathy among Undergraduate Medical Students: A Cross-sectional Study from Malappuram District, Kerala, India

Abstract

Introduction: Mercer and Reynolds defined empathy as the ability to understand the patient’s situation, perspective, and feelings, communicate that understanding, check its accuracy, and act on that understanding with the patient in a helpful way. Clinical empathy is shown to boost patient’s feelings of satisfaction, which helps with compliance. The results of earlier research have been mostly contradictory, with some studies demonstrating an increase in empathy and others showing no change or a decline. Aim: To assess clinical empathy among medical students and to study the associated factors with it. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in the Department of Community Medicine, MES Medical College, Perinthalmanna, Malappuram, Kerala, India, over a duration of four months from December 2018 to April 2019. The english version of Jefferson Scale of Empathy-S questionnaire (JSE-S) was used to assess clinical empathy. The JSE is a self-administered inventory that contains 20 questions, half of which were negatively phrased, while the other half were positively phrased. The students were asked to mark one out of seven options provided on a Likert scale in response to each item. The scale was reversed for negatively phrased items. Permission to use the questionnaire was obtained. The data collected was coded and entered in MS Excel and analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23.0. Baseline characteristics of the study subjects were explained in terms of frequency, percentage, mean and SD. Appropriate statistical techniques including t-test and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were applied to compare the means of two independent groups and more than two independent groups respectively. Pearson’s correlation test was applied to study the relation between two quantitative variables, age and empathy score. The p-value <0.05 was considered to be statistically significant. Results: The mean age of the study population was 21.36±1.54 years. A total of 360 participants, 263 (73%) were females, 251 (69.7%) of the study subjects were in the age group of 21 to 23 years. A total of 189 (52.5%) of the study participants chose people oriented specialty. The total mean JSE-S empathy score was 105.8±18.5. There was a statistically significant difference (p<0.001) in mean empathy scores among different age groups, gender and the academic year. Conclusion: Importance should be given to encourage every single individual from the primary level of understanding to matured state of mind to become empathetic. Clinical empathy should be nurtured starting from the commencement of the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) curriculum and beyond.

Keywords

• jefferson scale of empathy
• empathy scores
• patients satisfaction