Assessment of Empathy in a Standardized-Patient Examination

Background: Empathy has long been thought to be an important characteristic of a good physician, and a measure of empathy is needed to provide feedback to medical students, residents, and physicians on this important aspect of their clinical performance. The standardized-patient-testing format provides a simple but intuitively convincing approach to the assessment of empathy. Purpose: To determine the extent to which 4th-year medical students were checked "empathic" by standardized patients (SPs) on a performance-based examination, to evaluate the psychometric properties of this simple empathy measure, and to see whether empathy was related to clinical performance on history taking and physical examination. Method: Analyses were performed on examination data for 1,048 senior medical students in the 8 member schools of the New York City Consortium tested at The Morch and Center of Mount Sinai School ofMedicine. Results: The percentage of students who were checked "empathic" ranged from 59% to 98% (M = 79%)...