Introduction:

The empathy is essential to the development of an adequate physician-patient relationship. There is evidence about its benefits, but teaching is erratically incorporated into curricula and available material on didactic strategies employed is scarce. From an experience with pediatric residents at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Antioquia, IQual-e was generated to facilitate teacher-student feedback. This article presents the instrument and its application.

Subjects and methods:

Qualitative research experience in the teaching context. Through the analysis of content and argumentative discourse an instrument was generated for the formative evaluation of written productions about empathy in the physician-patient relationship. The instrument was applied to 23 residents of four cohorts of the Pedagogy course in Higher Education in Health in which the empathy in the doctor-patient relationship is addressed.

Results:

The IQual-e proposes an analysis of content and speech of sentences and global response from three main categories: conceptual adequacy, dimensions and sequence. The application of IQual-e to texts produced by residents reflected the multidimensionality of the empathy construct, replicated differences and contradictions that exist on its definition and showed deficiencies in empathy training.

Conclusions:

The IQual-e is an instrument that can be adapted to evaluate the content of reflections on a construct on which there are conflicting positions or multiplicity of interpretations. It can be used as a complement to rubrics, to evaluate reflective texts, open-ended questions and tests.

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