Can Visual Thinking Strategies training develop medical student empathy?

Empathy in the context of medical education is frequently defined as a cognitive attribute that involves an understanding of patients’ experiences and perspectives, including a motivation and capacity to act on this understanding to safeguard patient-centred care. Interventions aiming at developing medical students’ cognitive empathy have been developed. Here we hypothesise that participation in a Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) course will improve psychometrically assessed cognitive empathy in medical students, and that this change in empathy will be mediated by students’ personality traits.