JOHANNA SHAPIRO, ELIZABETH H. MORRISON & JOHN R. BOKER
Professionalism in medical education must include the development of empathy (Gianakos, 1996; Marcus, 1999), the capacity to participate deeply in another’s experience (Spiro, 1992). However, although learner empathy has been linked not only to patient satisfaction (Smith et al., 1995), but to clinical competence (Hojat et al., 2002), evidence suggests that empathy actually declines over the course of undergraduate medical education (Newton et al., 2000; Lu, 1995). To date, most pedagogical efforts have approached empathy as a set of cognitive and behavioural skills (Platt & Keller, 1994; Burack et al., 1999; Winefield & Chur-Hansen, 2000). Concerns have been expressed about whether this instructional method is sufficient to produce truly empathic physicians (Henry-Tillman et al., 2002).