Challenging the myth of the attrition of empathy in paediatrics residents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONTEXT: Empathy is vital to the physician-patient relationship. It promotes patient compliance and increases treatment efficacy. Studies evaluating the loss of empathy as residents advance through training curricula have generated inconsistent claims. Those considering diverse resident populations have supported a decline, whereas the few studies focused on paediatrics note stable empathy scores during training, which, indeed, exceed those of the general population. To better understand the issue as it pertains to paediatrics trainees, this study aimed to explore the state, and map a trajectory, of empathy in paediatrics residents, to identify factors influencing the learning and retention of empathy. METHODS: This qualitative descriptive study was conducted at an urban children's hospital in Canada. A total of 10 participants were recruited for semi-structured interviews via a purposeful sampling strategy. The institutional research ethics board approved the project. RESULTS: Senior residents (R3 and R4) reported increased empathy, attributable to greater knowledge regarding paediatric illnesses, according them a fuller sense of the impact on families. Challenges to sustained empathy correlated with published literature: time constraints, compassion fatigue and burnout with poor coping, and the hidden curriculum. Empathy was learned from peers, preceptors and other health care providers. Resident resilience, borne out of personal adversity, was protective against the loss of empathy. Residents advocated for increased autonomy and responsibility for patient care, and increased exposure to longitudinal care, including the patient's social context and home life, to increase resident empathy. CONCLUSIONS: Curriculum development committees could consider the inclusion of these encounters and experiences in residency training, although similar descriptive research in other specialty contexts would be needed to refine understanding.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".