Teaching empathy remains a challenge in medical education, particularly in anesthesiology, where physicians frequently care for patients at the end of life. Narrative Medicine, centered on communicative competence and patients’ lived experience, offers a framework for cultivating reflective and relational skills. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) systems can generate expressions of empathy, raising questions about authentic moral engagement. To explore how narrative-based education, combined with AI-generated texts, may stimulate reflection, we implemented an exploratory narrative-based intervention involving 25 anesthesiology residents, supported by three tutors, integrating literature, film, and AI-generated narratives. After an introduction session, participants engaged with excerpts from the book What Are You Going Through and the film The Room Next Door, followed by reflective writing based on five prompts. The same prompts were submitted to ChatGPT (OpenAI, GPT-4o) for comparative analysis, discussed during a debriefing session. Reflective writings were assessed using an adapted REFLECT rubric, alongside qualitative lexical and semantic analyses. Most participants did not reach the highest levels of reflective capacity, while ChatGPT texts achieved higher REFLECT scores, primarily due to linguistic coherence. These findings suggest that empathic competence is neither automatically acquired through medical training nor reducible to verbal fluency. Rather, it requires structured training grounded in meaningful engagement with patients.
Palma et al. (Tue,) studied this question.