The Effect of a Storytelling Course on Medical Students’ Empathy toward Patients

Empathy is a cognitive characteristic defined as the ability to understand people’s experiences, interests, and viewpoints and the capacity to share this understanding. Empathy constitutes the foundation for the patientphysician relationship, leading to both the patients’ and physicians’ satisfaction, and is effective on the patients’ cooperation and clinical outcomes. Many studies have shown that the level of empathy decreases in students during their clinical course. Learning literature and art is theoretically one of the methods to increase empathy in clinical environments. We aimed to assess the efficacy of storytelling on medical students’ empathy toward patients.

This quasi-experimental study with a nonequivalent group pretest-posttest design was performed during 2010-2011 in Zahedan, southeast Iran. We initially invited all fourth and fifth-year medical students studying at Zahedan University of Medical Sciences to participate in our study. The volunteers were asked to complete the Persian version of the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy-students version (JSPE-S) plus questions regarding their demographic data and the field in which they would like to continue their education. The case group was enrolled in 10 sessions of storytelling, each lasting for 2 hours. Part of a book was initially selected by the researcher and the students were unaware of the story. The participants then discussed the story recited by the researcher.

After the intervention, a decrease was observed in the mean of JSPE-S score of the control group, and an increase in the mean score of the case group. The participants did not differ significantly in terms of sex, age, duration of training course, and intended field of study. We found that the empathy score was not significantly related to the participants’ sex (p = 0.086), duration of training course (p = 0.210), age (p = 0.902), and tendency to study in different fields (p = 0.815).

Storytelling courses are possibly effective both in maintaining the level of medical students' empathy toward patients and in preventing the reduction of empathy during their education.