082-AP-02


Study Finds Primary Care Physicians Use Specific Skills, Attitude Training to Increase Medical Student Empathy Toward Patients

Irvine, Calif., May 10, 2002 - How well doctors empathize with patients-a key part of their "bedside manner"-may result from teaching a combination of specific skills and comprehensive attitudes in medical school, a UCI College of Medicine study has found.

The study, in the April issue of Academic Medicine, is believed to be one of the first to shed light on how empathy is taught to students. It shows that physicians are divided on exactly what approach to use to teach empathy and demonstrates that limiting the teaching of empathy to actions like eye contact and body language won't alone help students learn to better understand their patients.

Johanna Shapiro, professor of family medicine, found that medical school faculty usually combine comprehensive behavioral and specific actions when teaching empathy to students, but often disagree on which approach is more effective.

"Before this study, we knew very little about exactly how empathy was taught to medical students. Empathy is an important part of a medical career, where a doctor must be able to put him- or herself into the patient's shoes and understand what they're feeling," Shapiro said. "It can be taught, but there is some disagreement on whether specific, action-based lessons are better than a broad, attitudinal model."

Shapiro interviewed 12 primary care faculty members at UCI, who had been recognized for their outstanding teaching abilities. All faculty felt that empathy should be an integral part of a medical student's education.

"Some felt that teaching specific skills, like giving feedback, appropriate touch and even making follow-up calls made empathy easier to teach and made learning easier to evaluate," Shapiro said. "But skills alone ignore much of the richness of what actually occurs when a doctor and patient interact. This study shows many physicians believe that role models and other methods also are needed to instruct students on proper attitudes, including patient respect and connecting on a human level."

Shapiro noted that, regardless of their opinions over methods, all faculty in the study used some combination of teaching global attitudes as well as specific skills to bolster empathy in their students.

The faculty surveyed also acknowledged that empathy was very difficult for new physicians to use effectively, given the pressures of medical training and the tendency of students and doctors to distance themselves from patients' ills and emotions.

"Empathy isn't sympathy; it's not feeling sorry for a patient but understanding what they're going through," Shapiro said. "Proper training in empathy for patients may help physicians avoid the cynicism and harmful self-protective strategies that crop up during a medical career."

Shapiro and her colleagues have spent several years studying the effectiveness of medical training, including the use of humanities and other non-scientific disciplines in the medical school curriculum. They are examining ways to effectively incorporate both methods in the training of medical students.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE: A TOP-10 PUBLIC UNIVERSITY