MEASURING MEDICAL-STUDENTS EMPATHY SKILLS

Empathy is an important skill for the medical practitioner or medical students to develop when interviewing patients. It helps the interview er establish effective communication, which is important for accurate diagnosis and patient management. Two facets of medical education limi t students' development of accurate empathy: the traditional format of interviewing training and the social ethos of medical training and me dical practice, which stress clinical detachment. A number of research ers and educators have developed consulting skills training programmes , designed to enhance students' empathic skills and ability. One diffi culty for researchers has been the conceptual complexity of the term ' empathy' and greater difficulty in measuring the dimension. This paper reviews the range of approaches to the measurement of empathy and rep orts on a research study designed to evaluate a two-stage measurement technique, involving a pencil-and-paper test of empathy and independen t observer ratings of medical students' actual interview behaviours. R esults lead to the conclusion that pencil-and-paper tests of empathy c annot incorporate the range of complex cognitive, emotional and behavi oural components of the empathy construct. On the other hand, trained observers have been able to use items on a specially developed History -taking Rating Scale to discriminate between the empathic behaviours o f a group of students trained in consulting skills with those of a gro up of control students who each carried out videotaped history-taking interviews with hospitalized patients.