Culture, teaching and learning of empathy in medical education: Scoping review

Abstract

This article aims to identify, along the literature, how empathy is influenced by several cultural factors in the context of health professionals’ teaching-learning process. Performed as a scoping review study, as proposed by the Joanna Briggs Institute, the search was performed in PubMed, LILACS, SCOPUS and Web of Science databases, between December 2017 and January 2018. It was observed, through the researches, that Western students have a higher level of empathy compared to Eastern students, so there is also a difference in empathy between different ethinicity, race, sex and religion. It’s evaluated through different instruments. So, among the factors that influence empathy, culture was identified as one of them. Further studies are needed to better understand the empathy among the various health professions.