Universities – Docs’ self-rated care not necessarily appreciated – UoA

GPs who rate themselves as ‘compassionate’ don’t necessarily have patients who agree.

A doctor who believes they are offering compassionate care doesn’t necessarily mean their patients feel cared for, according to new research out of Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland.
 
While patients appreciate an accurate diagnosis, a clean clinic, decent quality testing and effective treatment, they also want to feel cared for, says Professor Nathan Consedine, a health psychologist in the School of Medicine at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland.
 
Consedine says the assumption has been that increasing compassion in providers will lead to patients feeling more cared for. However, whether it actually does so has not been studied.
 
In a recent study, Consedine and colleagues investigated whether doctors who felt they were compassionate had patients for whom correspondingly felt cared for.
 
The researchers surveyed more than a thousand anonymous patients about their experience of primary care, got ratings about their experience of compassion, and concluded by asking for the contact details of their GP.
 
The researchers then contacted their GP separately and asking them to answer questions about their practice, how compassionate they were, and so on. More than 200 GPs (40 percent of those asked) completed the questionnaire.
 
To the researcher’s surprise, doctors who rated themselves as more compassionate were not necessarily experienced as more caring by their patients. See Journal of General Internal Medicine.
 
In fact, there was no systematic link between a doctor’s compassion and the patient’s experience of care.
 
These findings suggest that a patient’s experience of compassion may or may not be related to their physicians’ self-assessed compassion.
 
Consedine says: “If you think about something analogous, like love languages, people like to be loved in diverse ways – some need touch, some need actions, some need words.
 
“So, assuming the same behaviour will have the same effect on everyone is misguided.
 
“You know that there will be age differences, gender differences, cultural differences, in what people need.”
 
This points to a need for further research to understand how compassion manifests in the things that doctors do to communicate compassion and how patients interpret these behaviours, Consedine says.