Empathy in nursing students. Cross-sectional study

Objective: To estimate the levels of empathy in students enrolled in the nursing program. Material and methods. Data Sources: The population consists of students from the first to the fifth academic year (Course) (N = 312, n = 253, 81.08% of the population). Selection of studies: Exploratory and cross-sectional study. Data extraction: The authors collected the information between January and February 2018. Participants answered the Jefferson Medical Scale of Empathy, the Spanish version for medical students (S version), validated and adapted for nursing students in Colombia. Results. Synthesis of the data: Cronbach’s alpha was satisfactory (not typifed = 0.891 and typified = 0.886), from which it is inferred that the data has internal reliability. The interclass correlation coefficient was 0.891; CI [0.87, 0.909] (F = 9.15, p = 0.005): confirms the good reliability. The authors observed that in empathy, this coefficient was highly significant in all three factors, with the eta-square value satisfactory and a high power observed. The significance level used was α ≤ 0.05 and β <0.20. Conclusions: The manifestation of the levels of empathy observed in this study agrees with the concept of empathic erosion, especially when analyzing empathic behavior in the male gender. The empathy levels in the students examined are relatively low, and authors conclude that there is considerable potential for growth of empathy and that of its components. Empathy is a complex part of academic formation that cannot be seen as an isolated variable.