Meditation and Student Empathy

Physician empathy and reducing stress are major factors in attaining positive clinical outcomes for patients. Fostering empathy in medical students is particularly important as they are the future of the healthcare workforce and a trend of declining empathy during medical education may lead to decreased health care quality outcomes. Meditation may be an avenue to promote positive student attitudes including empathy, though very few studies have examined this idea through empirical research. Using validated measures, the Jefferson scale of empathy and the perceived stress scale, we seek to investigate whether use of a meditation app will be associated with higher levels of self-rated empathy and lower self-rated stress.