Introduction: Empathy is an important core competency to be acquired by medical students that benefits both physician and patient. This study aimed to assess the level of empathy and the role of selected socio-demographic and academic factors affecting level of empathy among study participants. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among medical students enrolled at a medical college in Ahmedabad, Western India. The sample-size was 185 and applying probability-proportional-to-size to sampling-frame, 135 and 50 students were selected from undergraduate and postgraduate courses respectively. Systematic random-sampling selected further participants from different phases. The Jefferson Scale of Empathy-Student version (JSE-S) was utilized with socio-demographic details for personal interview. Three domains, “Perspective Taking”, “Compassionate Care”, and “Walking in the Patient’s Shoes” of empathy were evaluated. Results: The average empathy score of all students was 90.97±11.22. The mean empathy scores of undergraduates in the domains of compassionate care, perspective taking and walking in patients’ shoes were 29.32±6.84, 47.50±8.27 and 7.91±2.79 respectively. Mean empathy scores of postgraduates in the domains of compassionate care, perspective taking and walking in patients’ shoes were 32.14±6.44, 46.28±7.42 and 7.84±3.08 respectively. Conclusion: Average score of empathy among study participants was in “low” on the category of JSE-S. Variables with statistically significant associations with the mean score of empathy were; type of family, place of residence, year/phase of study, working status of parents and self-perceived effect of workload on empathy.
Patel et al. (Fri,) studied this question.