empathy, quality of life and occupational burnout among medical students

Background: empathy, quality of life, and occupational burnout are essential factors in medicalsciences that affect the physicians’ and patients’ communication. therefore, the purpose of thisstudy was to investigate the association of these three factors among medical students.methods: this descriptive correlational study was conducted among medical internshipstudents. participants were selected by using simple random sampling. the jefferson empathyquestionnaire, the who quality of life questionnaire, and the maslach burnout questionnairewere used for data collection. data were analyzed using t test, kruskal-wallis, analysis ofvariance (anova), and pearson’s correlation coefficient.results: a total of 167 students completed the questionnaires. the association of empathy andoccupational burnout (p = 0.005, r = -0.414) and between the quality of life and occupationalburnout (p = 0.005, r = -0.446) were both significantly negative. independent t test showed themean score of occupational burnout was significantly higher in male students than females. itwas also significantly higher in married students than single (p < 0.05). the results of the kruskal-wallis test showed no statistically significant difference among the quality of life of differentethnic groups (p > 0.05). one-way anova showed that there was a statistically significantdifference between the ethnic groups in terms of occupational burnout (p < 0.05)conclusions: the association of empathy and quality of life with occupational burnout wasnegative. the highest quality of life was related to older students. among all of the studiedvariables, married status, ethnicity, and sex were most associated with occupational burnoutwhere married and male students had the highest burnout.