Differences in Empathy Levels of Medical Students Based on Gender, Year of Medical School and Career Choice

Objective: To measure mean empathy scores of Pakistani medical students and to explore any association of empathy scores with gender, medical school year and future career choice. Study Design: Cross-sectional survey. Place and Duration of Study: Shifa College of Medicine, Shifa Tameer-e-Millat University, during the academic year 2015-2016. Methodology: The student version of Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy (JSPE) was distributed to the students electronically via the student portal. Response that were completed in full were included in the study. Descriptive statistics was used to analyse student demographic data. The student score on the JSPE was reported as the mean (out of 7) of each item. Independent samples t-test was employed to check the significant differences between genders. Empathy score with advancing year of study was investigated using ANOVA. ANOVA with post-hoc Tukey's test was used to study the relationship between career choice and empathy score. Results: The response rate was 70.94%. The mean score was 4.51 +/- 0.69. Females obtained greater, but statistically insignificant (p=0.08) empathy score (4.58) as compared to the male students (4.45). No statistically significant difference was seen between scores on the survey across the five academic years (F=0.88, p=0.47). Students who selected medicine and allied as career choice showed a significantly higher empathy score than those who opted for surgery. The internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's alpha) was 0.78. Conclusion: There were low levels of empathy in Pakistani medical students. Students with interest in medicine and allied showed higher empathy scores compared to surgical or technical specialties. No association of empathy scores with gender and medical school year was observed.