The Effectiveness of Using Empathy Courses to Guide OT Students in Case-base Clinical Reasoning

The Effectiveness of Using Empathy Experience Courses to Guide Occupational Therapy Students in Case-base Clinical Reasoning- A Pilot Study

Clinical reasoning is an important cognitive process in medical decision making. In recent years, medical education advocates holistic medicine, but systematic learning is rare in school education.Therefore, this study used an empathy experience course to conduct a case-oriented clinical reasoning training course to improve the empathy and clinical reasoning skills of pre-clinical students in occupational therapy through four sessions.

Objective: To investigate effectiveness of using empathy experience courses to guide the students who prior to occupational therapy(OT) practice in case-base clinical reasoning.

Materials and Methods: 30 students were recruited from 8 universities in Taiwan and randomly divided into an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group was given four 3-hour training sessions over 2 weeks, which included group instruction on empathy experience, clinical reasoning, and functional therapy case-oriented learning, while the control group was given case studies. Tests were administered before and after the series of sessions, including case report writing, C-JES-HPS, SACRR, and a follow-up visit at the end of the first phase of clinical practice using the C-JES-HPS and SACRR; course satisfaction surveys were completed after each session and at the follow-up visit to observe course satisfaction, usefulness, and recommendations. Data were analyzed using SPSS (version 20.0) with a significance level of 0.05. Univariate analyses with repeated measures 2-way analysis of variance were used to compare changes in empathy and clinical reasoning ability between the two groups of subjects and course satisfaction was presented as descriptive statistics. It was hypothesized that a case-oriented clinical reasoning training program using an empathy experience program would improve empathy and clinical reasoning skills in pre-practicum students in occupational therapy.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Occupational therapy students from National Taiwan University, Kaohsiung Medical University, Sun Yat-sen Medical University, National Cheng Kung University, Chang Gung University, IShou University, Fu Jen Catholic University, and Asia University who have completed their major credits and will be interning in a clinical hospital.
• Must be at least 20 years old and under 65 years old.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Those who are unable to attend the whole course.
• Those who have not completed their school credits and are unable to go to the clinical hospital for internship.
• Those who do not speak Chinese or English as their native language.