Public Health physicians and empathy: are we really emphatic? The Jefferson Scale applied to Italian resident doctors in Public Health.

Large gaps in care quality resulting from ineffective communication between health providers, patients, and other health care organizations have been documented. Research suggests that effective, empathic communication positively influences health outcomes. Many studies focused on the assessment of clinicians empathy, while there is still a lack of evidence on the role and level of empathy for public health medical doctors,especially during their postgraduate education. The aim of this study was to assess empathy level of public health residents, and to investigate differences in empathy scores using a validated questionnaire. The Italian version of the Jefferson scale of Physician Empathy …