ArticleBMJ open2017
Medical school selection criteria as predictors of medical student empathy: a cross-sectional study of medical students, Ireland.
Article in BMJ open, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Impact of early clinical exposure on medical students' competency development: a systematic review of evidence from Asian and African countries.BMC medical education · 2025Pooled it
- Insights into undergraduate medical student selection tools: a systematic review and meta-analysisJournal of educational evaluation for health professions · 2024Pooled it
- A Qualitative Study of a New Generation of Irish-Trained Doctors' Views on Selection for Medicine.MedEdPublish (2016) · 2026Article
- Students' self-perception of empathy in caring.Curationis · 2023Article
- Doctors' attitudes in the situation of delivering bad news: patients' experience and expectations.Archives of medical science : AMS · 2023Article
- Measurement of empathy among health professionals during Syrian crisis using the Syrian empathy scale.BMC medical education · 2021Observational
- Searching for the erosion of empathy in medical undergraduate students: a longitudinal study.BMJ open · 2020Article
- Empathy variation of undergraduate medical students after early clinical contact: a cross-sectional study in China.BMJ open · 2020Article
- Impact of University Mergers on Admission of Medical Students in China.Advances in medical education and practice · 2020Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesTo determine whether performance in any of the Health Professions Admissions Test (HPAT) sections, most specifically the interpersonal understanding section, correlates with self-reported empathy levels in medical students.
settingThe study was conducted in University College Cork, Ireland.
participants290 students participated in the study. Matching HPAT scores were available for 263 students. All male and female undergraduate students were invited to participate. Postgraduate and international students were excluded. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: Primary measures: HPAT-Ireland and Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy (JSE) scores were compared including subsection analysis. Secondary measures: comparisons were made between groups such as gender and year of programme.
resultsA total of 290 students participated. Males scored significantly higher than females for total HPAT-Ireland (U=7329, z=-2.04, p<0.05), HPAT-Ireland section 1 (U=5382, z=-5.21, p<0.001) and section 3 scores (U=6833, z=-2.85, p<0.01). In contrast, females scored significantly higher than males on HPAT-Ireland section 2 (U=5844, z=-4.46, p<0.001). Females demonstrated significantly higher total JSE scores relative to males (mean score ± SEM: 113.33±1.05
conclusionThe introduction of the HPAT-Ireland test was partly designed to identify students with strong interpersonal skills. A significant finding of this study is that JSE values did not correlate with HPAT-Ireland scores. This study suggests no clear link between scores on a selection test, the HPAT-Ireland, which is designed to assess several skill domains including interpersonal skills, and scores on a psychometric measure of empathy, at any point during medical education.
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