Using theater to teach clinical empathy: A pilot study

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 <=.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 <=.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.