Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Participatory Medicine
Date Submitted: Nov 23, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 15, 2025 - Jan 1, 2026
Date Accepted: Jan 6, 2026
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Involving Patients to Enhance Empathy in Science-Focused Learning at Medical School: The Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Lecture-based Educational Intervention
ABSTRACT
Background:
Despite increasing patient involvement in medical education, research has predominantly focused on involvement within small-group teaching. This study explored what it means to actively and meaningfully involve patients in large-group, lecture-based teaching while avoiding historical paternalistic approaches.
Objective:
To describe the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel curricula-component involving primary care patients in the early-years biomedical, clinical and social science teaching to promote empathy in medical students.
Methods:
Kern’s Six Step Approach to curriculum development was used to guide the design of this curricula-component, enhancing the existing curriculum by hosting real patients in lectures to add a genuine and authentic patient voice. The design process was supplemented by a co-production workshop with patients, educators and students. Patients were recruited to take part via local primary care networks and the University of Leicester Patient and Carer Group. Nine modules in year 1 and 2 hosted patients in lectures across the 2023-24 academic year. A student feedback questionnaire, based on previous similar published studies, was developed to assess engagement and achievement of learning outcomes.
Results:
First- and second-year students (n=604) attended mandatory biomedical, clinical and social science lectures hosting patients throughout the 2023-24 academic year. Sixty-six percent (n=396) of students completed feedback questionnaires at the end of the year. Most students (86%) reported patients in lectures increased their feelings of empathy and 84% reported it improved their engagement with learning.
Conclusions:
The novel application of real patients and their stories presented in biomedical, clinical and social science lecture-based teaching has the potential to improve student learning and enhance feelings of empathy towards patients. Our findings are reproducible and transferable and the intervention was well received by students.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.