Co-Producing an Empathy-Focused Medical Curriculum With Patients, Educators, and Students

Medical curriculum development rarely involves patients, educators, and students, meaning that key stakeholders' voices are not adequately represented in curricular content. In this paper, we describe the co-production of an empathy-focused medical curriculum involving patients, educators, and students.

We adopted the National Institute for Health Research co-production principles to develop three curriculum streams: 1) delivering evidence-based empathy lectures, 2) involving patients in biomedical science teaching, and 3) implementing longitudinal empathic communication and clinical skills teaching. Patients, educators, and students were purposefully sampled from one medical school. At least one co-production workshop was conducted for each curriculum stream, combined with written engagement. All participants were prepared, and patients were remunerated.

Four co-production workshops took place between July 2023 and April 2024. There were 24 participants (eight patients, eight educators, and eight students). Co-production developed new lectures on the importance of therapeutic empathy, meaningful approaches to active patient involvement in biomedical science lectures, and communication and clinical skills training re-framed from a patient perspective. A longitudinal evaluation will assess the impact of these changes on students' empathy.

Co-producing a medical curriculum can lead to important curricular changes, including greater integration of the patient voice across a five-year programme. Five key learning points can assist curriculum developers in their future efforts to co-produce medical curricula: 1) appoint an independent point-of-contact to support participants, 2) create a feedback loop, 3) encourage various modes of engagement, 4) explore and be open to all contributions, and 5) be transparent about the process.