A Longitudinal Measure of Medical Student Empathy at a Regional Campus

Abstract

Introduction Empathy is an important characteristic of the ideal physician. Various quantitative measures of empathy have shown a steep decline during the third year of medical school. Methods We had 4 classes of medical students at our regional rural campus complete the Jefferson Scale of Empathy after each of the first 3 years. We report longitudinal results of 30 students, individually matched, including an analysis by gender. Separately, we report the cross-sectional results for 39 of our students as they began medical school. We compare our student scores to other allopathic and osteopathic student scores from large urban campuses. The Baptist Health Madisonville IRB approved the protocol as exempt. Results As they begin medical school, our students have similar scores to those at large urban campuses (difference of 1.1 points, p=.421). After the M-2 year, our students had significantly higher scores than those at urban campuses (5.7 points, p=.002) and after the M-3 year, they show an even larger positive difference (9.0 points, p<.001). As in previous publications, females had higher overall mean scores at each measure, but with our students this was only significant in post-M-2 measures (8.9 points, p=.01). Discussion We conclude that something about our students’ experience during their M-3 year is associated with a smaller decline in empathy measures than reported previously. We propose that some of this difference could be due to a formal professional identity curriculum we implemented recently during the M-3 year. However, without a concurrent or historical control group, we cannot be certain. We offer the concept of measuring empathy before and after curricular change as another useful evaluation tool for medical educators.

Keywords

• Empathy; Rural Campus; Education and/or Curriculum Development