Introducing Compassionate Care to Undergraduate Health Science Students and Evaluating Its Implementation: A Pilot...

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Digital Pedagogy
• Healthcare Professional Development

Background:

• Healthcare education struggles with an "empathy crisis," where students' empathy declines during clinical training.
• Compassionate care is vital for patient outcomes but often neglected in biomedical curricula.
• Asynchronous digital pedagogy presents a scalable solution to enhance humanistic aspects of care.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the impact of an asynchronous, distance-based educational intervention on empathy and compassionate care.
• To assess changes in undergraduate healthcare students from Nursing, Physiotherapy, and Medicine departments.
• To explore the potential of digital tools in addressing the empathy crisis in medical education.

Main Methods:

• A pilot pre- and post-intervention study with 50 undergraduate healthcare students.
• A five-module asynchronous digital course focused on compassionate care applications.
• Assessment of empathy and compassion using the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) and Compassion Competence Scale (CCS).

Main Results:

• Statistically significant improvements in total empathy scores (TEQ) from 47.00 to 55.00 (p<0.05).
• Increased proportion of participants with higher-than-normal empathy from 58% to 88% (p<0.05).
• Significant gains in compassionate competence dimensions (Communication, Sensitivity, Insight) and a "convergence effect" narrowing inter-faculty gaps.

Conclusions:

• Structured, distance-based compassionate care training positively impacts empathy and compassion competencies.
• Asynchronous digital interventions show promise in enhancing essential humanistic skills in healthcare students.
• The study suggests a viable method to combat the empathy crisis in healthcare education.