How empathic are pharmacy students?

The ability to consult with patients is becoming an increas-ingly important skill for pharmacists, in view of their chan- ging role. Indeed, poor consultation skills have been shown to be an important contributing factor to many of the medica-tion-related problems that patients experience.1 An effective consultation has several components making up its effective- ness; in the widely used DREAM approach to consultation,these are; collect Data, establish Rapport, provide Education And stimulate Motivation.2 In order to establish rapport with a patient, it is essential to be empathic; however, a recentstudy found that community pharmacists had significantly lower empathy scores compared with general practitioners.3 Given this difference, the aims of this study were to deter-mine whether students entering a degree in either medicine or pharmacy had differing initial empathy scores, and to deter-mine how the course affected their empathy score.