Measurement of Empathy among Health Professionals During Syrian Crisis using the Syrian Empathy Scale

Abstract Background: Health professionals should have certain degree of empathy to eliminate the pain and suffering of their patients. There is a need to design a scale, which can assess empathy among health professionals and is relevant to community and culture. Therefore, this study was undertaken to measure the empathy among Syrian health professionals and students of health professions using a newly designed Syrian Empathy Scale.Methods: A cross-sectional observational study was undertaken. A total of 223 participants (121 males and 102 females) responded to the Syrian Empathy Scale SES from Medical (n=62), Dental (n=152) and Pharmacy faculties (n=9). They were 119 undergraduates, 64 postgraduates and 40 general practitioners. The SES was designed as a tool that includes 20 items in a 7-point Likert-type scale with overall score ranges from 20 to 140. Group comparisons of the empathy scores were conducted using t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA). A factor analysis was performed. Bartlett’s test of the sphericity and the KMO measure of sampling adequacy were also determined. Cronbach’s alpha was calculated.Results: A significant difference was found between males and females in the SES mean score. The ANOVA analysis showed that the SES empathy score of pharmacist was higher than medical doctors and dentists with no significant difference. The SES empathy score of undergraduates was significantly higher than postgraduates and practitioners. Findings of KMO indicated sampling adequacy (KMO= 0.827 > 0.7) and the value of Bartlett’s test of the sphericity (1288.76, df = 190, P-value<0.001) proved that the factor analysis is meaningful and acceptable. The results of varimax rotation proved that five main factors were retained.Conclusion: Findings of this study support the reliability of the newly designed Syrian Empathy Scale for measuring empathy in the field of health care. The SES can be suggested for assessing empathy in different health educational programs. However, future works are still essential to support the validity of the scale as well as to ascertain the role of empathy in improving health care.