Abstract
Background: Empathy refers to a person’s ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Empathy is a skill that allows a medical practitioner to develop a therapeutic relationship with their patients and contributes to establishing good patient-centred care. Developing this relationship has shown a positive link to patient perceptions and success, as well as decreased practitioner burnout and depression. Considering the benefit an empathetic practitioner-patient relationship could offer, it would be pertinent to investigate the empathy levels within health students where empathetic skills begin developing and are the most easily influenced. While this has been investigated in other types of health students, there is little evidence on the empathy levels on chiropractic students.
Aim: The aim of this study was to determine the self-reported empathy levels of chiropractic students from the University of Johannesburg.
Research Methodology: The design of this research was a cross-sectional, quantitative and explorative. An anonymous questionnaire, namely the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ), was used to collect data for this study. The survey was carried out using the platform QuestionPro® and required no identifying data, keeping all responses anonymous. The participants included in the study were chiropractic students registered for the Bachelor of Health Sciences (BHSc) and Masters of Health Sciences (MHSc) programme at the University of Johannesburg. A WhatsApp link to the survey was sent out to all Chiropractic students by each class representative, containing all the relevant information about the research, as well as a consent form. Participants were made aware that their participation was voluntary and confidential, and they were allowed to withdraw from the study at any point prior to the submission of the questionnaire. The data was collected and analyzed by the researcher and statistician to assess any possible trends in the responses. Descriptive statistics, reliability testing and normality testing was performed on the results of this questionnaire.
Results: One hundred forty-two (n=142) chiropractic students from the University of Johannesburg, participated in this research study resulting in a response rate of 55.68%. The results of this study showed good levels of self-reported empathy across all the participants. When comparing empathy across the different ages of participants, no statistically significant difference was found (p=0.975). When comparing empathy across the various years of study, a statistically significant difference was found (p=0.032), indicating that the junior students reported higher levels of empathy than the senior students. The number of female participants
VII
exceeded that of the males, therefore, the comparison between empathy in males and females was not possible.
Conclusion and Recommendations: Generally good levels of self-reported empathy across the UJ chiropractic student respondents were found. The addition of the biopsychosocial model and patient-centred care in the curriculum at this university may have helped ensure these students have higher levels of empathy and better communication with their patients. Future research on this topic would benefit from a larger sample size of chiropractic students, extending the questionnaire out to other universities.
Keywords: Empathy, chiropractic, patient-centred care, students