Enhancing Empathy in Medical Communication Through Perspective-Taking
Public ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT00861991. Field values are reproduced from the official study page; the official ClinicalTrials.gov record remains the source of truth for eligibility, enrollment, and contact information.
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Brief summary
Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.
Background: Empathy is critical to clinician-patient communication and patient outcomes. Perspective-taking, an intervention demonstrated in other contexts to induce empathy, has never been studied in a medical context. As a first step in evaluating its potential clinical value, the studies described below assess perspective taking in a series of clinical skills examinations. These examinations are simulated clinical encounters: students encounter and are evaluated by standardized patients (SPs)--actors trained to take on patient roles. Though not real clinical encounters, clinical skills examinations have been demonstrated to test clinical competency well enough to be incorporated into the licensure examination of the National Board of Medical Examiners. Objective: To assess if perspective-taking improves the satisfaction of standardized patients in three clinical skills examinations. Hypothesis: Students receiving a perspective taking intervention will receive better standardized patient satisfaction scores than control students. Design and Setting: Three randomized, controlled studies. Studies 1 and 3: Junior medical students(N = 503), 6-station clinical skills examination. Study 2: physician assistant students (N = 105), 3-station clinical skills examination. Intervention: The intervention students received a perspective-taking instruction prior to their examination asking them to put themselves in their "patients" shoes and to imagine what they were thinking and feeling. The control students received standard pre-examination instructions. Simulated patients were blind to study condition. Main Outcome Measure: Simulated patient satisfaction scores.
Study identification
- NCT ID
- NCT00861991
- Recruitment status
- Completed
- Study type
- Interventional
- Phase
- Not applicable
- Enrollment
- 608 participants
Conditions and interventions
Conditions
Eligibility (public fields only)
- Age range
- 20 Years to 45 Years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Healthy volunteers not accepted
This page does not interpret eligibility. Detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria are on the official ClinicalTrials.gov record.
Study timeline
- Start date
- May 31, 2006
- Primary completion
- Jul 31, 2007
- Completion
- Jul 31, 2007
- Last update posted
- Mar 15, 2009
2006 – 2007
United States locations
- U.S. sites
- 1
- U.S. states
- 1
- U.S. cities
- 1
| Facility | City | State | ZIP | Site status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| George Washington University School of Medicine | Washington D.C. | District of Columbia | 20037 | — |
Site contact phone numbers, emails, and investigator names are intentionally not displayed here. Open the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for site contact information.
About this trial record page
- What this page shows
- Public field values for ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT00861991, including study identification, conditions, interventions, eligibility (age, sex, healthy volunteer), timeline, and U.S. site list.
- What this page does not do
- No medical advice, eligibility judgments, treatment recommendations, study quality scoring, or AI-generated medical summaries. No site contact phone numbers, emails, or investigator names.
- Where the data comes from
- Sourced from the official ClinicalTrials.gov public API. The official record is the source of truth.
- Last refresh
- Last update posted Mar 15, 2009 · Synced Sep 3, 2026
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Open the official record
The complete protocol, eligibility criteria, and contact information for NCT00861991 live on ClinicalTrials.gov.