Strategies to incorporate simulated patient encounters to promote a level of empathy in medical and nursing students

Abstract

Empathy is one of the essential elements in providing humanistic medical care, leading to better outcome for both health professions and patients. The recommendations in empathy training using simulated patient (SP) encounter are not clearly explained. The objectives of this study were to identify essential features of SP encounter-integrated interventions for teaching empathy in medical and nursing students and to list other learning activities which were commonly added in the training program. This study was a narrative review. Five databases, namely PubMed, Academic Search Complete, Education Resource Information Center, Scopus, and Web of Science were searched for relevant studies on the effect of the SP encounter on medical and nursing students’ empathy which were published in English between January 2010 and December 2020. Population-Intervention-Compare-Outcome framework was used as a guide. Fifteen studies were in the final review. It was found that effective empathy-teaching SP encounter interventions comprised at least five activities, including preparation, briefing, simulation, feedback or debriefing and reflecting, encompassing all Kolb’s learning stages in which reflective observation seemed to most influence learning. The study showed that reviewed SP-based teaching interventions were various in terms of teaching management and supplementary activities. It was recommended that medical program should integrate this teaching method in the curriculum and further study should investigate difference in benefit among various intervention design elements.