ArticleEuropean journal of dental education : official journal of the Association for Dental Education in Europe2023
Can a virtual learning module foster empathy in dental undergraduate students?
Article in European journal of dental education : official journal of the Association for Dental Education in Europe, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Could Empathy Be Taught? The Role of Advanced Technologies to Foster Empathy in Medical Students and Healthcare Professionals: A Systematic Review.Journal of medical systems · 2025Pooled it
- Dental students' attitudes toward community service: a pre-post survey study of a service-learning experience in Chile.BMC medical education · 2026Article
- Scoping Literature Review of Digital Empathy Games in Healthcare Education and Training.European journal of dental education : official journal of the Association for Dental Education in Europe · 2026Article
- Impact of sensitisation workshop on empathy levels among postgraduate students: A pre-post interventional study.Bioinformation · 2026Article
- Exploring the use of a virtual patient model for teaching clinical empathy to medical students at a tertiary care institute: a cross-sectional study.Journal of rural medicine : JRM · 2026Article
- Development of client-centredness: Perceptions of interprofessional health care students.Canadian journal of dental hygiene : CJDH = Journal canadien de l'hygiene dentaire : JCHD · 2025Article
- Effectiveness of professional-identity-formation and clinical communication-skills programs on medical students' empathy in the COVID-19 context: comparison between pre-pandemic in-person classes and during-pandemic online classes.BMC medical education · 2025Observational
- Developing empathy in healthcare professions students: protocol of a mixed-methods non-controlled longitudinal intervention study.Frontiers in medicine · 2024Article
- Behavior analysis and formative assessments in online oral medicine education during the COVID-19 pandemic.World journal of clinical cases · 2023Article
- Can a virtual learning module foster empathy in dental undergraduate students?European journal of dental education : official journal of the Association for Dental Education in Europe · 2023Article
- The effects of compassionate care on oral health outcomes: A scoping review.Special care in dentistry : official publication of the American Association of Hospital Dentists, the Academy of Dentistry for the Handicapped, and the American Society for Geriatric DentistryArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundEmpathy is an essential part of patient-centred health care, which positively benefits both patients and clinicians. There is little agreement regarding how best to design and deliver training for healthcare trainees to impart the skills and behaviours of clinical empathy. The study aimed to inform the field by sharing an educational intervention where we aimed to improve empathy amongst dental undergraduate students in Trinity College Dublin using a virtual learning module.
methodsAdopting pre-post-repeat pre-experimental design, dental professional students completed the Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE) for Health Professional Students immediately prior to and after a three-week virtual programme designed to increase clinical empathy. Using a three-factor model described for the JSE in the literature, scores were evaluated for internal consistency and paired tests were performed on scores appropriate to their distributions. Seven-point Likert scales were scored to record student experience of training and technology, which are reported descriptively.
resultsMost of the 37 participants were female (76%) and represented dental science (N = 27) and dental hygiene roles (N = 7). Results revealed a mean JSE-HPS scale score rise from 110.0 (SD = 10.4) to 116.4 (SD = 11.1), which represented a rise of 5.8% (t (36) = 3.6, p = 0.001). The three factors associated with cognitive empathy, namely perspective-taking (T(36) = 3.931, p < 0.001; walking in the patient's shoes T(36) = 2.093, p = 0.043); and compassionate care (Z = 2.469, p = 0.014) were all found to have increased after the intervention. Students reported a positive experience of discipline-specific and generic videos as part of the module.
conclusionThe study demonstrated that a virtual educational module was associated with an increase in empathy amongst dental undergraduate students. The design of a blended module incorporating the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and virtual learning are beneficial and have a promising future.
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