Correlation between medical student empathy and a Korean nationwide comprehensive clinical assessment score at a medical school in Korea

Empathy is the ability to understand and communicate a patient’s situation, perspective, and feelings. When demonstrated by healthcare professionals, this can improve patient adherence, satisfaction, and treatment outcomes. Empathic students have stronger affective skills and can acquire, develop, reinforce, and display strong affective behaviors, abilities, and attitudes. We measured student empathy using the Student Version of the Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE-S) and assessed 3-year sequential clinical comprehensive assessment scores conducted by the Korean Medical Education Assessment Corporation to determine the relationship between JSE-S and clinical comprehensive assessment scores. The study population comprised of 80 males (74%) and 28 females (26%), among which 38 (35%) and 62 (57%) students wanted to become private physicians and attending faculty, respectively. Regarding future majors, 58 students (54%) considered medical fields, whereas 40 students (37%) considered surgical fields. No significant differences in Korean JSE-S were observed according to medical student gender, career aspirations, or future major fields. The modified Korean version of the JSE-S has 18 items. Item-total score correlations and Cronbach α evaluated the internal consistency reliability of the scale. The reliability of the Korean JSE-S was 0.910 by Cronbach α coefficient. Female students had better scores than males. Students who wanted to be an attending faculty had better scores than others who wanted to be private physicians; however, these findings were not statistically significant. Significantly higher scores were seen among students aspired to work in the medical field (65.6 ± 8.8) versus in the surgical field (60.4 ± 8.2) in their 5th year (P < .01). We were unable to show the positive correlations between the empathy scale and comprehensive assessment results. Among female medical students, comprehensive assessment results were inversely correlated with empathy toward the patient, but this was not statistically significant. The modified Korean JSE-S has acceptable reliability. Every student had a better comprehensive assessment after studying the medical curriculum between the 4th and 6th years. The current nationwide assessment tool does not measure student empathy.