Observational studyBMC medical education2025
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.
Observational study in BMC medical education, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Presence and Nature of AI-Use Disclosure Statements in Medical Education Journals: A Bibliometric Study.Perspectives on medical education · 2026Article
- Teacher-student empathic relationship shaping: an elimination mechanism for psychological segmentations in entrepreneurship education.BMC psychology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundEnhancing students' empathy is critical in medical school education. The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a shift from in-person to online classes. However, the effectiveness of online classes for enhancing medical students' empathy has not been investigated sufficiently and the evidence is limited. This study compared the effectiveness of enhancing empathy between pre-pandemic in-person classes and during-pandemic online classes among medical students in Japan using pre-pandemic and during-pandemic data.
methodsThis is a retrospective observational study. This study measured students' empathy using the Japanese translation of the Jefferson Scale of Empathy-Student Version (JSE-S) before and after the special programs for professional identity formation and clinical communication among first- and second-year students who matriculated from 2015-2021. This study categorized the matriculation year groups as "pre-pandemic" and "during-pandemic" groups for the first- and second-year students. This study estimated the adjusted mean score differences of the JSE-S and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) from the pre- to post-program between the pre-pandemic and during-pandemic groups in the first and second years using linear regression analysis.
resultsThis study's participants included 653 first-year students and 562 second-year students. In the first year, the during-pandemic group had a significantly higher mean score difference from the pre- to post-program compared to the pre-pandemic group. The adjusted regression coefficient (95% CI) was 7.6 (5.7 - 9.5), with the pre-pandemic group as the reference. In the second year, there were no significant differences between the two groups.
conclusionsThe results suggest that online classes are not inferior to in-person classes or even slightly better in enhancing medical students' empathy, which should be clarified by further studies. This study's findings have important implications for medical education and implementing hybrid class formats to enhance students' empathy.
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