Background: Clinical empathy, a critical skill for the doctor-patient relationship, is infrequently taught in graduate medical education. No study has tested if clinical empathy can be taught effectively.
Objective: To assess whether medicine residents can learn clinical empathy techniques from theater professors.
Design: A controlled trial of a clinical empathy curriculum taught and assessed by 4 theater professors.
Setting: Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, a large urban university and health system.
Participants: Twenty Internal Medicine residents: 14 in the intervention group, 6 in the control group.
Intervention: Six hours of classroom instruction and workshop time with professors of theater.
Measurements: Scores derived from an instrument with 6 subscores designed to measure empathy in real-time patient encounters. Baseline comparisons were made using two-sample T tests. A mixed-effects analysis of variance model was applied to test for significance between the control and intervention groups.
Results: The intervention group demonstrated significant improvement (p < or = .011) across all 6 subscores between pre-intervention and post-intervention observations. Compared to the control group, the intervention group had better posttest scores in 5 of 6 subscores (p < or = .01).
Limitations: The study was neither randomized nor blinded.
Conclusions: Collaborative efforts between the departments of theater and medicine are effective in teaching clinical empathy techniques.