As doctors, we want to do everything in our power to help a patient recover from their condition or injury, but we also want to provide them with a caring experience along the way. While the focus may be on the endgame, how a person gets there is also important, and sometimes that can get lost on doctors who sometimes only see things in black and white.
Improving the quality of care doctors provide to their patients was the focus of a recent study published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. For the study, the authors were interested in seeing how time spent with or without the patient affected that patient’s perception of empathy. For example, if a patient waited in the waiting room for 20 minutes and then saw the doctor for 10 minutes, would they be more likely or less likely to rate their doctor as empathetic compared to someone who waited for 5 minutes in the lobby and saw the doctor for a half an hour.
Quality Time With Patients
After looking at the data, researchers were a little surprised with the results. They found that neither variable – time spent in the waiting room and time spent with the doctor – had an impact on their perception of the doctor’s empathy towards their situation. This is interesting, because a lot of doctors believe that patients want to wait less and have more time with the doctor. While this sentiment may be true, study authors found that those factors had no impact on the patient’s perception of empathy from the doctor.
However, researchers did find that there was a direct, inverse relationship between the doctor’s self-reported stress level and the patient-perceived empathy. For every 1-point increase in a surgeon’s self-reported stress (measured by the Perceived Stress Scale), there was a 0.87 decrease in perceived empathy (measured with the Jefferson Scale of Patient’s Perceptions of Physician Empathy).
Essentially, a quality interaction is more important than a short wait time or more time spent with the doctor, and a physician’s stress level appears to have a direct effect on their ability to provide their patient with a quality interaction. So if doctors can work to lower their stress levels, which admittedly is easier said than done, we may be able to provide our patients with a more meaningful visit.
Helping each patient is important, but letting them know that they are important to us is just as crucial during the care process. When we’re stressed, our patients suffer, so doctors need to work on lowering their stress levels for their sake and for the sake of their patients.