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Context and background: The doctor's empathy has a positive influence on patient health, but a decline in empathy at the start of clinical placements has been observed in the majority of studies. To compensate for this decline, specific interventions are being developed. Objective: The aim of this longitudinal study was to evaluate changes in the empathy of French fourth-year medical students following integrative training in the therapeutic relationship, including theory classes, Balint groups, role-playing and objective structured clinical examinations with standardized patients. Methods: Empathy levels were measured with the French version of the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy − Medical Student (JSPE-MS) at the beginning and end of the course, and six months later. The study was carried out on matched data from 110 students. The primary endpoint was the difference in mean JSPE-MS scores between the three assessment times. Analyses were performed using Student's t tests for paired data. Results: The results of the matched cohort indicate that the empathy of medical students who completed the training and responded to the study did not change significantly during the fourth year and the six months that followed. Conclusion: Integrative training in the therapeutic relationship, given at the same time as the first clinical clerkships, can help preserve clinical empathy. These results reinforce the value of multimodal, sequential training in empathy for medical students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: In this study, we aimed to assess (1) the agreement between patient self-reports and general practitioner (GP) reports of the chronic conditions affecting the patients and (2) the agreement between patients and GPs on health priorities in a primary care setting.Method: Patients were recruited in the Parisian area of France by a convenience sample of GPs; eligibility criteria required that the GP was the patient's listed primary care provider for at least 12 months. Participants were asked to report all the patient's current chronic conditions by using a previously developed list of 124 chronic conditions and write a list of up to 3 priority conditions.Results: From April to May 2017, 233 patients were recruited from 16 GP practices. Agreement between the number of conditions reported by patients and by GPs was moderate (intraclass correlation coefficient 0.59, 95% CI, 0.50 to 0.69). Agreement between patient self-reports and GP reports of each chronic condition ranged from very good (eg, κ = 0.85 for hypothyroidism) to poor (eg, κ = 0.12 for chronic anxiety disorder). Among the 153 patient-GP pairs for which both the patient and GP wrote a priority list, 45 (29.4%) of patients' first priorities did not appear anywhere on the corresponding GPs' lists, and 19 (12.4%) pairs had no matching priority condition.Conclusions: Agreement between patients and their GPs varied widely depending on the diseases reported. Low agreement on health priorities suggests a need for improvement to ensure better alignment between patient and physician perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]