Beyond the Drill: Understanding Empathy Among Undergraduate Dental Students

Compassionate care and empathy are fundamental components of health care which contribute to the social construction of physician-patient relationship to meet the expectations of the patients. The aim of this study was to evaluate clinical empathy among undergraduate dental students at a University in the Middle East.

It was a cross-sectional study which used purposive sampling to recruit undergraduate dental students from five academic years. The Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy-Health Profession Students was used, a reliable 20-item tool with a total score ranging from 20 to 140. Data collection was done online using Google Forms. All data were analysed and visualised using RStudio (version 2023.06.2) incorporating R version 4.0.5. Descriptive statistics including confidence intervals were calculated for each item and for the combined data set. Analysis of variance was used to determine any significant variation between the results by demographic factors. Estimated marginal means were calculated from the ANOVA outcomes.

Responses were received from 150 participants including 75 males and 75 females. The overall response rate was 90.36%. The overall mean total score was 96.01 (95% CI 93.73-98.30). Analysis of variance (ANOVA) identified significant variation by gender only with female participants achieving statistically significant higher overall scores than male participants (f = 6.502, p = 0.012).

The study evaluated empathy among dental undergraduate students. The total mean scores of the participants appeared to be comparable to those reported in the literature findings. Higher mean empathy scores were observed for female participants in the current study. These findings emphasise the need for targeted interventions to promote empathy among dental students to boost patient-centred care.