Fear and Empathy with COVID-19 Patients Among Medical Students

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has induced fear and mental health problems in the community and among healthcare workers. Empathy with patients may be difficult in such situations due to urgent conditions. Objectives: We aimed to evaluate medical students’ empathy and fear toward COVID-19 patients during the pandemic. Methods: This cross-sectional study recruited 107 medical students from Shiraz Medical School in 2021. A Persian version of the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy (JSPE) was used to assess the participants’ empathy toward COVID-19 patients. The internal validity of the Persian version of JSPE was 0.78, and its test-retest reliability after 14 days was 0.92 in a previous study. The participants were requested to fill out a fear of COVID-19 scale (FCV-19S) previously developed to assess their fear of affliction with COVID-19. Since the normality of data distribution was not approved, we used nonparametric tests, namely, the Mann-Whitney U test and the Spearman correlation coefficient. Results: The mean empathy score based on the Persian version JSPE was 71.94 ± 12.83 out of 140, which was higher in male students and those who resided in dormitories. The mean fear score was 24.93 ± 6.16 out of 35. Participants living out of dormitories feared COVID-19 to a greater extent. No statistically significant association was found between the age of the participants and these two parameters. The Spearman correlation coefficient test showed that students with a history of COVID-19 had less fear and more empathy because of their experience with COVID-19 (r = -0.249, P-value = 0.02). Conclusions: This study highlights the impact of the pandemic on the interaction between medical students as healthcare professionals and patients by affecting medical students’ fear and empathy. The study indicates ways to improve readiness for future pandemics. Our study showed that living far away from families in dormitories may influence students’ fear and empathy. Moreover, empathy, unlike fear, was affected by gender. A reverse correlation existed between fear and empathy in students with a history of COVID-19, indicating that the more they had empathy, the less they experienced fear.