Empathy, Stress
Conditions
Brief summary
Physician empathy and reducing stress are major factors in attaining positive clinical outcomes for patients. Fostering empathy in medical students is particularly important as they are the future of the healthcare workforce and a trend of declining empathy during medical education may lead to decreased health care quality outcomes. Meditation may be an avenue to promote positive student attitudes including empathy, though very few studies have examined this idea through empirical research. Using validated measures, the Jefferson scale of empathy and the perceived stress scale, we seek to investigate whether use of a meditation app will be associated with higher levels of self-rated empathy and lower self-rated stress.
Interventions
BEHAVIORALMeditation
Meditate 3 times a week using headspace app
Sponsors
New York Institute of Technology
Study design
Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Intervention model
PARALLEL
Primary purpose
PREVENTION
Masking
NONE
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
ALL
Age
18 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
Yes
Inclusion criteria
-Medical students from New York Institute of Technology
Exclusion criteria
-Not a medical student
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Perceived stress scale (PSS) | 6 months | Perceived stress scale measures stress levels. 10 item scale where subjects are asked to indicate by circling how often they felt or thought a certain way on a scale of 1-4. Items are them added up- a higher score means higher stress. |
| Jefferson scale of empathy | 6 months | Jefferson scale of Empathy measures empathy levels. 20 item scale where subjects are asked to indicate by circling how often they felt or thought a certain way about empathy related situations on a scale of 1-7. Items are them added up- a higher score means higher empathy. |
Outcome results
None listed