Pohontsch Nadine Janis, Stark Anne, Scherer Martin
Department of General Practice and Primary Care, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Martinistr. 52, 20246, Hamburg, Germany.
BMC Med Educ. 2024 Dec 5;24(1):1422. doi: 10.1186/s12909-024-06428-5.
Empathy plays an important role in the interaction and communication with patients. Physicians' empathy has various positive patients' and physicians' outcomes. Despite the inclusion of empathy in medical curricula and the relevance of empathy in general and physicians' concept of it to medical care, there is no common definition of empathy in the clinical context: definitions tend to be abstract and we do not know enough about medical students' conceptualization of clinical empathy. A clear and consensual definition of empathy is needed to be able to teach and measure empathy adequately. We aimed to explore German medical students' views and understanding of (clinical) empathy.
We interviewed 24 students from the second half of the 3rd year and in their final clinical year (six female and male students in each subgroup) using a semi-structured interview guide. Interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim. We analysed the transcripts using thematic synthesis (Braun & Clarke).
We found three overarching themes: (1) empathy means perceiving and understanding patients' needs and acting accordingly, (2) empathy as an interpersonal, intangible construct and (3) taking time for patients. Showing interests, impartiality and openness towards the patients as well as the need to take patients seriously, treating them with respect, having a holistic view on patients and generate some kind of closeness with patients are subthemes of the first overarching theme.
Although it is often stated that the various existing definitions of empathy are abstract or far from practice, German medical students seem to have a good idea how to define empathy. Their definition resembles definitions known from the literature and used in education. Further research is needed to compare concepts of empathy of medical students from different countries and cultural backgrounds to inform research and teaching. It would also be interesting to investigate how concepts of empathy change over the course of study and affect perceptions of empathy in third party assessments.
同理心在与患者的互动和沟通中起着重要作用。医生的同理心对患者和医生都有各种积极的结果。尽管医学课程中纳入了同理心，且同理心总体上以及医生对它的理解与医疗护理相关，但在临床环境中，对于同理心并没有一个共同的定义：定义往往很抽象，而且我们对医学生对临床同理心的概念化了解不足。需要一个清晰且一致认可的同理心定义，以便能够充分地教授和衡量同理心。我们旨在探究德国医学生对（临床）同理心的看法和理解。
我们使用半结构化访谈指南，对24名三年级下学期和最后临床学年的学生（每个亚组有6名男女学生）进行了访谈。访谈进行了数字录音并逐字转录。我们使用主题综合法（布劳恩和克拉克）对转录本进行了分析。
我们发现了三个总体主题：（1）同理心意味着感知和理解患者的需求并据此采取行动，（2）同理心是一种人际间的、无形的概念，（3）为患者花费时间。对患者表现出兴趣、公正和开放，以及认真对待患者、尊重患者、对患者有整体观并与患者建立某种亲密关系，是第一个总体主题的子主题。
尽管人们常说现有的各种同理心定义很抽象或远离实践，但德国医学生似乎对如何定义同理心有很好的想法。他们的定义类似于文献中已知并用于教育中的定义。需要进一步研究来比较来自不同国家和文化背景的医学生的同理心概念，以为研究和教学提供信息。研究医学生在学习过程中同理心概念如何变化以及如何影响第三方评估中的同理心认知也会很有趣。
