Introducing Compassionate Care to Undergraduate Health Science Students and Evaluating Its Implementation: A Pilot Study

TL;DR

This pilot study shows that an online course on compassionate care can improve empathy and related skills in healthcare students.

Contribution

The study introduces and evaluates an asynchronous digital intervention to enhance compassionate care in undergraduate health science education.

Findings

Empathy scores increased significantly after the intervention, with 88% showing higher-than-normal empathy.

Compassion competence in communication, sensitivity, and insight all improved significantly.

Medical and physiotherapy students showed the most improvement, narrowing competency gaps.

Abstract

Introduction: Healthcare education faces a documented "empathy crisis," where students often experience a decline in empathic capacity during clinical training. While compassionate care is fundamental to patient outcomes, it is frequently sidelined in traditional biomedical curricula. Asynchronous digital pedagogy offers a potentially scalable, exploratory solution to bridge this humanistic gap.

Aim: This pilot study aimed to evaluate the potential impacts of an asynchronous, distance-based educational intervention in enhancing empathy and compassionate care among undergraduate healthcare students from the Departments of Nursing, Physiotherapy, and Medicine.

Methodology: A pilot pre- and post-intervention study was conducted with 50 undergraduate healthcare students. In the absence of a control group, the study utilized a convenience sampling design. The intervention consisted of a five-module asynchronous digital course focusing on applications of compassionate care. Empathy and compassion competence were assessed using the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) and the Compassion Competence Scale (CCS). Statistical analysis was performed using non-parametric tests, including the Wilcoxon signed-rank and McNemar tests, along with Spearman's rho correlation and Bonferroni adjustments for subgroup comparisons.

Results: Statistically significant improvements were observed across all domains. Median total empathy scores (TEQ) increased from 47.00 to 55.00 (p<0.05), while the proportion of participants reflecting higher-than-normal empathy rose from 58% to 88% (p<0.05). Significant increases were also recorded in all compassionate competence dimensions: Communication, Sensitivity, and Insight. A notable "convergence effect" was observed, as Medical and Physiotherapy students, who initially presented lower baseline scores, exhibited pronounced improvements, suggesting that the intervention may help narrow inter-faculty competency gaps.

Conclusions: The findings suggest that structured, distance-based compassionate care training is associated with positive impacts on empathy and compassion-related competencies.

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