Empathy Boosts Lifelong Learning Through Teamwork, Peruvian Student Survey Finds

A large survey of medical and nursing students in Peru suggests that empathy does not act on lifelong learning directly, but works substantially through a social channel: the quality of physician–nurse collaboration. The study, published in BMC Medical Education, analyzed responses from 1,707 undergraduate students at four Peruvian universities using validated Jefferson Scales for empathy, collaboration, and lifelong learning. Because raw medical and nursing samples differed in demographic makeup, the researchers applied propensity score matching to build two balanced groups of 600 students each before comparing the disciplines.

The matched comparison revealed marked disciplinary differences. Nursing students scored significantly higher than medical students on collaboration, with a large effect size of Cohen’s d = 1.24, and on lifelong learning, with a moderate effect size of Cohen’s d = 0.45. The authors stress that these are cross-sectional associations from a single-country student sample, so the findings describe group differences at one point in time rather than developmental changes over the course of training.

To test how the three constructs fit together, the team ran mediation analyses separately by discipline, using bias-corrected bootstrapping to estimate the indirect pathway. In both groups, empathy was positively associated with lifelong learning through the mediating role of physician–nurse collaboration. In other words, students who reported more empathic dispositions also reported stronger collaborative attitudes, and that collaborative orientation, in turn, aligned with greater engagement in ongoing professional learning.

The striking result was how much of the total effect traveled through this pathway in each discipline. Among nursing students, collaboration mediated 58.18 percent of the total effect of empathy on lifelong learning, compared with 34.48 percent among medical students. Multigroup structural equation modeling then tested whether the two disciplines shared the same underlying structure. The comparison confirmed that the disciplinary difference was statistically robust, driven by a stronger impact of collaboration on lifelong learning in the nursing cohort, with a chi-square difference of 29.43 and p < 0.001.

The authors interpret this pattern as evidence that interprofessional collaboration functions as a critical social-learning pathway, transforming empathic dispositions into sustained professional development. Because the mediating route was substantially stronger in nursing students, the study suggests that the same empathic disposition may be converted into lifelong learning more efficiently where collaborative practice is emphasized. The researchers frame professionalism in health professions education as a multidimensional construct integrating empathy, collaboration, and lifelong learning, whose structural interrelationships had previously been insufficiently examined, particularly across disciplines.

Several caveats bound the conclusions. The design is cross-sectional, so the direction of the modeled pathway is a structural hypothesis rather than a demonstrated causal sequence. The sample consists of undergraduate students in Peru, and the authors note that disciplinary differences and generalizability to other settings or to practicing clinicians remain open questions. The measurements rely on self-reported validated scales, which capture perceptions rather than observed collaborative behavior. The propensity score matching balanced the demographic profiles of the two 600-student groups, but it cannot remove all sources of confounding between disciplines.

Within those limits, the study offers a quantitative account of how three pillars of professionalism interlock. Empathy, collaboration, and lifelong learning each have established links to positive educational outcomes, but the mediation analysis shows that their combined structure differs measurably between medical and nursing students. The finding that collaboration carries a larger share of the empathy-to-learning pathway in nursing aligns with the discipline’s stronger reported collaboration scores and suggests that educational programs seeking to cultivate lifelong learners may need to consider the social context in which empathic attitudes are expressed.

For curriculum designers, the results point to interprofessional collaboration as a potential lever: if empathic dispositions are to translate into sustained professional development, the collaborative environment linking physicians and nurses may be where that translation happens most effectively. The authors conclude that their findings highlight collaboration as a social-learning mechanism, and the multigroup modeling approach demonstrates a technical way to test whether such mechanisms operate differently across the health professions.

Subject of Research: Interprofessional collaboration as a mediator between empathy and lifelong learning in health professions education: a multigroup structural equation modeling approach

Article Title: Interprofessional collaboration as a mediator between empathy and lifelong learning in health professions education: a multigroup structural equation modeling approach

Article References: Huang, Z., Yao, H., Chen, H., Zhang, Z., & Lin, D. (2026). Interprofessional collaboration as a mediator between empathy and lifelong learning in health professions education: a multigroup structural equation modeling approach. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10234-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10234-6

Keywords: Interprofessional, collaboration, mediator, between, empathy, lifelong, learning, health, professions, education, multigroup, structural