Medical schools ‘make students less empathetic’

A “hidden curriculum” unintentionally present in medical schools is responsible for making doctors less empathetic towards their patients, new research has found.

The study, published in BMC Medical Education, has found this has the effect of making students cynical, emotionally distanced and desensitised.

The University of Leicester study has outlined why empathy declines during medical training, and raises important questions about the fitness of medical education.

Researchers analysed data from 16 studies and 771 medical students and found that when they enter the clinical, patient-facing phase of their training they are met with a hidden, informal curriculum.

Campus resource: Using empathy in the classroom can have a great impact on learning

They found that this stems from subtle, non-formal influences on students, such as a stressful workload, the organisational culture of healthcare settings, poor role models, and an undue focus on the biomedical model of disease.

Students adapted by developing cynicism, and becoming emotionally distanced and desensitised, the study’s findings revealed.

Lead author of the study, Jeremy Howick, director of the Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare, said empathy helps both patients and doctors, so medical schools should be expected to foster it.

“Instead, albeit inadvertently via a hidden curriculum, the opposite happens. By bringing the cause of empathy decline to light, our study paves the way for educational programmes that foster and maintain empathy in medical students”, he added.

“Reducing the empathy decline involves implementing an ‘empathic hidden curriculum’ to provide students with direct experiences of what it is like to be a patient, alongside peer support, resilience training, empathy lectures and training for role models to display enhanced empathy.”

Previous studies in the US have discovered similar results; that medical school students lose empathy with others as they progress through their training.

While the studies included in the systematic review were small, the researchers argue that following further research, newly developed methods of medical education should seek to stem the decline of empathy in medical schools so both patients and doctors can benefit from a more empathic healthcare system.

The Stoneygate Centre was set up in 2022 to pioneer a robust new approach to medical education and training with empathy at its core.

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com