8 research outputs found
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Can a virtual learning module foster empathy in dental undergraduate students?
BACKGROUND: Empathy is an essential part of patient-centred health care, which positively benefits both patients and clinicians. There is little agreement regarding how best to design and deliver training for healthcare trainees to impart the skills and behaviours of clinical empathy. The study aimed to inform the field by sharing an educational intervention where we aimed to improve empathy amongst dental undergraduate students in Trinity College Dublin using a virtual learning module. METHODS: Adopting pre-post-repeat pre-experimental design, dental professional students completed the Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE) for Health Professional Students immediately prior to and after a three-week virtual programme designed to increase clinical empathy. Using a three-factor model described for the JSE in the literature, scores were evaluated for internal consistency and paired tests were performed on scores appropriate to their distributions. Seven-point Likert scales were scored to record student experience of training and technology, which are reported descriptively. RESULTS: Most of the 37 participants were female (76%) and represented dental science (N = 27) and dental hygiene roles (N = 7). Results revealed a mean JSE-HPS scale score rise from 110.0 (SD = 10.4) to 116.4 (SD = 11.1), which represented a rise of 5.8% (t (36) = 3.6, p = 0.001). The three factors associated with cognitive empathy, namely perspective-taking (T(36) = 3.931, p < 0.001; walking in the patient's shoes T(36) = 2.093, p = 0.043); and compassionate care (Z = 2.469, p = 0.014) were all found to have increased after the intervention. Students reported a positive experience of discipline-specific and generic videos as part of the module. CONCLUSION: The study demonstrated that a virtual educational module was associated with an increase in empathy amongst dental undergraduate students. The design of a blended module incorporating the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and virtual learning are beneficial and have a promising future
Introducing patient and dentist profiling and crowdsourcing to improve trust in dental care recommendation systems
© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014. Healthcare blogs, podcasts, search engines and health social networks are now widely used, and referred as crowdsources, to share information such as opinions, side effects, medication and types of therapies. Although attitudes and perceptions of the users play a vital role on how they create, share, retrieve and utilise the information for their own or recommend to others, recommendation systems have not taken the attitudes and perceptions into considerations for matching. Our research aims at defining a trust dependent framework to design recommendation system that uses profiling and social networks in dental care. This paper focuses on trust derived in direct interaction between a patient and a dentist from subjective characteristics’ point of view. It highlights that attitudes, behaviours and perception of both patients and dentists are important social elements, which enhance trust and improve the matching process between them. This study forms a basis for our profile-based framework for dynamic dental care recommendation systems