Empathy of Medical Students and Compassionate Care for Dying Patients: An Assessment of "No One Dies Alone" Program.

The "No One Dies Alone" (NODA) program was initiated to provide compassionate companions to the bedside of dying patients. This study was designed to test the following hypotheses: (1) Empathy scores would be higher among medical students who volunteered to participate in the NODA program than nonvolunteers; (2) Spending time with dying patients would enhance empathy in medical students. Study sample included 525 first- and second-year medical students, 54 of whom volunteered to participate in the NODA program. Of these volunteers, 26 had the opportunity to visit a dying patient (experimental group), and 28 did not, due to scheduling conflicts (volunteer control group). The rest of the sample (n = 471) comprised the "nonvolunteer control group." Comparisons of the aforementioned groups on scores of the Jefferson Scale of Empathy confirmed the first research hypothesis ( P < .05, Cohen d = 0.37); the second hypothesis was not confirmed. This study has implications for the assessment of empathy in physicians-in-training, and timely for recruiting compassionate companion volunteers (armed with personal protective equipment) at the bedside of lonely dying patients infected by COVID-19.
Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The authors declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The corresponding author created the Jefferson Scale of Empathy that was used in this study, for which his university holds the copyright and generates revenue from others' use of this instrument, but the corresponding author derives no financial benefit.
(© The Author(s) 2020.)