Level of Empathy in Physicians of the Emergency Room of a Public Hospital in Mexico City

Abstract

Objective: to identify the level of empathy in the doctor-patient relationship of interns, residents and affiliated physicians assigned to an emergency room of a public hospital. Methods: observational, descriptive and cross-sectional study carried out between September and October 2014. Non-randomized sample by convenience in the total population of physicians assigned to the Emergency Room. Under informed consent, it was applied the validated and translated into Spanish instrument, the Jefferson scale of empathy in its Student version to physicians assigned to the Emergency Room of a public hospital of the Ministry of Health in Mexico City. For the statistical inferential analysis the non-parametric test of Kruskal-Wallis and U of Mann-Whitney were used; the significance level was α=0.05 for both; the statistical program spss v. 18 was used. Results: according to the Jefferson scale, 17 of the 51 physicians included in the study, did not show empathy (33.3%), 10 were moderately empathetic (19.6%) and 24 were completely empathetic (47.1%). Conclusions: about half of the 51 interviewed physicians presented empathy in the doctor-patient relationship.