The difficult doctor? Characteristics of physicians who report frustration with patients: an analysis of survey data.
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ABSTRACT: Background
Literature on difficult doctor-patient relationships has focused on the "difficult patient." Our objective was to determine physician and practice characteristics associated with greater physician-reported frustration with patients.Methods
We conducted a secondary analysis of the Physicians Worklife Survey, which surveyed a random national sample of physicians. Participants were 1391 family medicine, general internal medicine, and medicine subspecialty physicians. The survey assessed physician and practice characteristics, including stress, depression and anxiety symptoms, practice setting, work hours, case-mix, and control over administrative and clinical practice. Physicians estimated the percentage of their patients who were "generally frustrating to deal with." We categorized physicians by quartile of reported frustrating patients and compared characteristics of physicians in the top quartile to those in the other three quartiles. We used logistic regression to model physician characteristics associated with greater frustration.Results
In unadjusted analyses, physicians who reported high frustration with patients were younger (p < 0.001); worked more hours per week (p = 0.041); and had more symptoms of depression, stress, and anxiety (p < 0.004 for all). In the final model, factors independently associated with high frustration included age < 40 years, work hours > 55 per week, higher stress, practice in a medicine subspeciality, and greater number of patients with psychosocial problems or substance abuse.Conclusion
Personal and practice characteristics of physicians who report high frustration with patients differ from those of other physicians. Understanding factors contributing to physician frustration with patients may allow us to improve the quality of patient-physician relationships.
SUBMITTER: Krebs EE
PROVIDER: S-EPMC1617099 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:BackgroundThere has been significant effort in attempting to use health care data. However, laws that protect patients' privacy have restricted data use because health care data contain sensitive information. Thus, discussions on privacy laws now focus on the active use of health care data beyond protection. However, current literature does not clarify the obstacles that make data usage and deidentification processes difficult or elaborate on users' needs for data linking from practical perspectives.ObjectiveThe objective of this study is to investigate (1) the current status of data use in each medical area, (2) institutional efforts and difficulties in deidentification processes, and (3) users' data linking needs.MethodsWe conducted a cross-sectional online survey. To recruit people who have used health care data, we publicized the promotion campaign and sent official documents to an academic society encouraging participation in the online survey.ResultsIn total, 128 participants responded to the online survey; 10 participants were excluded for either inconsistent responses or lack of demand for health care data. Finally, 118 participants' responses were analyzed. The majority of participants worked in general hospitals or universities (62/118, 52.5% and 51/118, 43.2%, respectively, multiple-choice answers). More than half of participants responded that they have a need for clinical data (82/118, 69.5%) and public data (76/118, 64.4%). Furthermore, 85.6% (101/118) of respondents conducted deidentification measures when using data, and they considered rigid social culture as an obstacle for deidentification (28/101, 27.7%). In addition, they required data linking (98/118, 83.1%), and they noted deregulation and data standardization to allow access to health care data linking (33/98, 33.7% and 38/98, 38.8%, respectively). There were no significant differences in the proportion of responded data needs and linking in groups that used health care data for either public purposes or commercial purposes.ConclusionsThis study provides a cross-sectional view from a practical, user-oriented perspective on the kinds of data users want to utilize, efforts and difficulties in deidentification processes, and the needs for data linking. Most users want to use clinical and public data, and most participants conduct deidentification processes and express a desire to conduct data linking. Our study confirmed that they noted regulation as a primary obstacle whether their purpose is commercial or public. A legal system based on both data utilization and data protection needs is required.
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Project description:Numerous studies covering some aspects of SARS-CoV-2 data analyses are being published on a daily basis, including a regularly updated phylogeny on nextstrain.org. Here, we review the difficulties of inferring reliable phylogenies by example of a data snapshot comprising a quality-filtered subset of 8,736 out of all 16,453 virus sequences available on May 5, 2020 from gisaid.org. We find that it is difficult to infer a reliable phylogeny on these data due to the large number of sequences in conjunction with the low number of mutations. We further find that rooting the inferred phylogeny with some degree of confidence either via the bat and pangolin outgroups or by applying novel computational methods on the ingroup phylogeny does not appear to be credible. Finally, an automatic classification of the current sequences into subclasses using the mPTP tool for molecular species delimitation is also, as might be expected, not possible, as the sequences are too closely related. We conclude that, although the application of phylogenetic methods to disentangle the evolution and spread of COVID-19 provides some insight, results of phylogenetic analyses, in particular those conducted under the default settings of current phylogenetic inference tools, as well as downstream analyses on the inferred phylogenies, should be considered and interpreted with extreme caution.
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