Teaching Empathy: the Implementation of a Video Game into a Psychiatry Clerkship Curriculum

Abstract

Objective: Empathy plays an important role for physicians, but the literature demonstrates that it often deteriorates during medical school. The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of the interactive video game "That Dragon, Cancer" as a tool to teach empathy to third-year medical students.

Methods: The authors gave a modified, Jefferson Scales of Physician Empathy (JSPE) to 84 third-year medical students in their psychiatry clerkship before and after they played and completed "That Dragon, Cancer" during the 2016-2017 academic calendar year.

Results: The average level of empathy in the students as measured by least squares means of the answers to the truncated JSPE improved after playing through "That Dragon, Cancer" (5.7738 vs 6.2322, p < 0.0001). The majority of students agreed that learning empathy through video games was preferable and more effective than traditional didactics.

Conclusions: Interactive video games such as "That Dragon, Cancer" may be useful as part of innovative curricula to improve empathy among third-year medical students.

Keywords: Empathy; Psychiatry education; Third year medical school; Video games.