Patient Storytelling to Teach Empathy to Medical Students

Empathy is crucial for physicians. Studies consistently showed that it improves clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction. So it is an essential component of medical education. But how can we improve medical students’ empathy?

Several methods could be available but a group of researchers from Japan used patient storytelling for this purpose. Let’s see if it worked.

The intervention included a 10-minute introductory lecture, followed by 30 minutes of patient storytelling, 20 minutes of group discussion among the students, and a 20-minute Q&A session with the patient.

In the storytelling part, a 40 years old patient who had a chronic kidney disease and had been on dialysis for 23 years. He then received a donated kidney transplant. In the session, he gave a talk under the title “The Power of Medical Professionals’ Words”. He told his story about how the words of doctors and nurses marked turning points in his life.

The researchers assessed student empathy using Jefferson Scale of Empathy- Student Version. They administered the scale before the intervention, immediately after the intervention, and six months after the intervention.

In the assessment that was carried out immediately after the session, an increase was observed in empathy scores compared to the pretest scores, and this increase was statistically significant. However, the effect size was 0.4, which is low. In the assessment carried out six months later, the increase compared to the pretest was still significant but with a lower effect size, which was 0.26.

This study suggested that patient storytelling is effective even in the long-term but this effect is low. Of course, it is difficult to expect that only one session of storytelling can sustainably increase empathy in students. Repetitive interventions are needed. Furthermore, since it was a single group pretest-posttest study without a control group, we cannot put forward that the cause of the improvement is the storytelling.

Despite these limitations, it is fair to say that patient storytelling is a promising method that can be used to improve medical students’ empathy.
If you want to read more, you can find the link to the article at the description below the video: https://youtu.be/U_QRRdrRoBk

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