General Practitioners (GPs) with self-reported high empathy prescribed significantly less penicillin than low empathy GPs, according to a study published in BMC Primary Care.
The highest empathy GPs outscored the lowest empathy GPs across all subcomponents of the JSE-HP . Scores on the PT and CC subscales contributed more to the overall score than did WPS. This is because the PT and CC subscales contain most of the items of the 20-item scale. Therefore, the largest component of the difference between high and low empathy GPs was from variation in scores on the perspective taking subcomponent.
]. Overall, this potential link may be for the benefit of patients served by high empathy GPs. For instance, in terms of lower drug costs and fewer resistant bacteria. The applied split on low decile versus top decile empathy scores rather than the choice of larger groups has the benefit that it allows us to create relatively extreme profiles of empathy corresponding to larger group difference between means that causes statistical power to increase. Furthermore, the applied subgroups keep a minimum of observations in each group for inference.