Patient-Physician Communication – Doctor’s Perspective

Beginning from obtaining a proper patient history to planning the right treatment course, every doctor’s relationship with their patient is moulded through effective communication. Patient-physician communication plays a vital role is decreasing the possibility of errors and ensures that the right treatment is given to the patient. But there are times when physicians come across patients who carry a longstanding conversation that can take a lot of physician’s time and energy.

A survey was conducted in the WhiteCoats app, to evaluate the prevalence of burnout in doctors during endless conversations.

The survey comprised of 6 different questions and 117 doctors from various specialties actively responded to the survey.

The total number of doctors that responded to the survey comprised of Diabetologists (43%), Radiologists (16%), Anaesthesiologists (11%), Surgeons (10%), Gynaecologists/ Obstetrician and Dentists (6% each), Cardiologists (4%), and Others (4%).

81% of doctors said that their patients took too much of their time sometimes, while 15% of doctors agreed this happened always.

A majority (72%) of our doctors revealed that they experience physical draining and almost 56% of physicians face emotional distress.

67% of doctors responded that they take measures sometimes and 15% of doctors said they always took measures to overcome these stresses.

Almost 44% of physicians claim that the stress could affect the next patient interaction, while 33% feel this can happen sometimes.

82% of doctors agreed that longstanding communication with the patient was not the only stressful factor during patient-physician interaction.

Though it is important to have a productive patient-physician conversation, it is also essential for doctors to make sure that the conversation does not take a lot of their valuable time and reach to a point that leads to burn-out.

Stress is detrimental to every individual’s health and doctors are not an exception to it. Although the established results support that coping up with stress would help, but conscious efforts to avoid stress is all that looks possible, what’s your opinion doctors?

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