Empathy in medical education : a case study in a private Lebanese medical school

Abstract

Healthcare reform is a movement that attends to clinical encounters in order to optimize quality medical care granted to patients. As a result, primary attention is directed towards finding innovative dimensions that reconnects frontline healthcare providers with the major mission of promoting the ultimate wellbeing of humans (Practice & Halpern, 2001). My argument in this study addresses narrative medicine, a patient centered model, as an innovative approach that involves promoting narrative competencies that enables healthcare providers to practice medicine with empathy for enhanced positive clinical outcomes (Charon, 2001). Narrative medicine, as a model for empathy, fosters bridging the gap in communication and building a trustful compliance within the patient-physician relationship (Stepien & Baernstein, 2006). This study􀂶s purpose is to examine evidence of narrative medicine as an innovative educational strategy that promotes empathic abilities in medical students in the curriculum of a private Lebanese medical school. It also describes the perceptions of the coordinators of the four years of medical education with regard to empathy and its role in medical education today and explores variations of empathy levels among medical students across four years with different levels of exposure to clinical experiences through the quantitative Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy (JSPE) (Hojat et al., 2018). This exploratory study addresses gaps in the medical teaching practices and provides recommendations towards the importance of attending to narrative practices and empathic abilities as an effective strategy to increase the efficiency in patient encounters and to ensure positive clinical outcomes.