Empathy and Person-Centered Care from the perspective of undergraduate Speech-Language Pathology students

To correlate the empathy of undergraduate Speech-Language Pathology students with their preference for the person-centered care (PCC) model.

This is a cross-sectional quantitative study using a questionnaire. Undergraduate Speech Language Pathology students from any academic year, enrolled in any Higher Education Institution (HEI), aged 18 years or older, participated in the study. Participants completed the Brazilian Portuguese version of the Patient-Practitioner Orientation Scale (PPOS) and the Empathy Inventory via an online form. A simple descriptive statistical analysis and data analysis based on total scores and dimensions of the applied instruments were performed. A significance level of p < 0.05 was adopted.

Forty undergraduate Speech-Language Pathology students participated, with an average age of 26.25 years. Of these, 82.5% were students from private HEIs, and 67.5% were from the southern region of the country. Regarding the PPOS scale, participants scored higher in the "caring" dimension. For the Empathy Inventory, higher scores were observed in the "affective sensitivity" factor and lower scores in the "interpersonal flexibility" factor. A significant positive correlation was found between the total scores of the questionnaires, between the "interpersonal flexibility" factor and the "caring" dimension, and between the "altruism" factor and the "caring" dimension.

In the evaluated sample, undergraduate Speech-Language Pathology students with higher levels of empathy, particularly altruism and interpersonal flexibility, demonstrated a tendency to prefer the PCC model. Thus, investing in strategies to enhance empathy in undergraduate students may encourage the adoption of the PCC model, contributing to improved patient care quality in Speech-Language Pathology.