Empathy is an important skill for the medical practitioner or medical students to develop when interviewing patients.

It helps the interviewer establish effective communication, which is important for accurate diagnosis and patient management.

Two facets of medical education limit students'development of accurate empathy: the traditional format of interviewing training and the social ethos of medical training and medical practice, which stress clinical detachment.

A number of researchers and educators have developed consulting skills training programmes, designed to enhance students' empathic skills and ability.

One difficulty for researchers has been the conceptual complexity of the term « empathy » and greater difficulty in measuring the dimension.

This paper reviews the range of approaches to the measurement of empathy and reports on a research study designed to evaluate a two-stage measurement technique, involving a pencil-and-paper test of empathy and independent observer ratings of medical student's actual interview behaviours.