Testing the effects of communication skills e-learning for practitioners on patients’ musculoskeletal pain and enablement

From 2022 to 2024 we ran the TIP study to test the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of EMPathicO e-learning for primary care clinicians.  EMPathicO is a brief e-learning package that we developed with patients, GPs, nurses, and physiotherapists, to help primary care clinicians deliver positive empathic care (see how we developed it here).  The TIP study was co-led by Professors Flis Bishop and Hazel Everitt at the University of Southampton.  We collaborated closely with our PPI partner (Jennifer Bostock) and colleagues at Keele University (Christian Mallen, Lorna Clarson), University of Bristol (Matthew Ridd, Kirsty Garfield), and University of Leicester (Jeremy Howick).

In the TIP study we measured the effects of EMPathicO on patients’ pain, other symptoms, and quality of life and the cost of delivering the training and the economic costs and benefits of doing so. We did this by comparing primary care practices that had been trained to deliver positive empathic care with practices that did not have the EmpathicO training (we call this a randomised controlled trial). In total,1682 patients and 236 primary care clinicians from 53 general practices across England and Wales took part in the TIP study.  Half of the general practices had EMPathicO training and half did not.  We collected lots of information from our participants, using questionnaires and interviews, and analysed the data systematically. 

These are the main results:

• Clinicians said EMPathicO was relevant, easy to do and informative. They completed the training and felt it benefitted their communication skills without lengthening consultations.
• EMPathicO was cost-effective, safe and did not lead to increased heath care costs.
• Patients highly valued empathy and optimism.  On average, they rated their clinicians as ‘very good’ at being empathic.
• We didn’t find a difference in patient outcomes between those seeing EMPathicO-trained clinicians and the usual care group whose clinicians had not had EMPathicO.

Now we are working on sharing our findings and embedding EMPathicO within medical student training.  If you’d like to find out more, see the visual summary for clinicians and patients, and read our academic papers below.