A Community Service Organization Focused on the Arts to Develop Empathy in Pharmacy Students

Abstract

Objective. To implement and assess pharmacy students' opinions of a new student organization that uses visual, linguistic, and performing arts to bring emotional support, joy, and healing to patients. Methods. Pro Mé, an on-campus, community-service organization was formed at the Appalachian College of Pharmacy for students with talent or background in the arts. Members organized performances and art events at local assisted living facilities, long-term care facilities, hospitals, mobile medical clinics, schools, etc. The group also promoted various public health care initiatives. A survey was conducted to assess the impact of participation in the organization on members. Results. Pro Mé began in March 2018 with 27 initial members. Approximately one year later, the organization had grown to 66 members and become the largest student organization on campus. During its first year, members participated in a wide array of community service events. On the survey, students reported having increased empathy and that participation in Pro Mé had enhanced their overall pharmacy school experience. Conclusion. Establishing a performing arts organization like Pro Mé at other pharmacy schools could provide students with a creative outlet, leadership opportunities, and patient contact experiences that can increase their compassion and empathy and thereby better prepare them to be practicing clinicians.

Rapid Scoping Review: Empathy in Health Sciences Curriculum

“…were explicitly described; however, close to 90% of the training interventions provided information about the education intervention used to teach students how to better communicate with patients (e.g., role-play, simulations, group discussions, etc. ), which allowed for some training program extrapolation [13,14,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][44][45][46][47][48].…”

“…Emotional empathy, often referred to as clinical empathy, is the ability to share another person's feelings, and focuses on understanding the patient's feelings and using their experiences to skillfully adjust [9,10,23]. Though extrapolated in most of the identified studies, it appears that cognitive training methodologies, those most often employed in academia, were most commonly used to train pharmacy and nursing students in empathy, followed closely by emotional/behavioral frameworks [13,14,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][44][45][46][47][48]. Utilization of emotional/behavioral learning frameworks in empathy training program development may allow for improved understanding and subsequent adjustment of clinical care to better meet the needs of patients.…”

Enhancing student empathy through the taxonomy of significant learning

“…These authors suggested how those with higher levels of empathy have the potential to create better brand positioning. Other studies have looked at empathy in various formats to include the role of the arts in influencing empathy in college students (Preston and Jean-Louis, 2020) along with how empathy mediates avoidance and well-being (Wei et al, 2011).…”

Narrative Medicine to Affect Empathy in Medication Counselling – A Pre-Post Intervention Study of a Course in Narrative Medicine for Pharmacists

“…Among pharmacists, only a few studies describe empathy levels using empathy scales (8-11) whereas levels among pharmacy students have been more abundantly measured (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21). A few studies among pharmacy students indicate that education in narrative medicine can strengthen the students' competencies in relation to empathy, social understanding, and communication (22)(23)(24)(25).…”