Patients’ attitudes towards clinical interviews in various fields of medical specialties

Although the physician patent relationship is of special significance for a proper diagnosis, few studies have been done to find out how successful these interactions are across various medical specialties. Common physician knowledge measured by a questionnaire tended to view fields such as psychiatry more successful in achieving patient satisfaction than other specialties. However, the validity of such assumption has rarely been assessed significantly. The current study was designed to find out whether medical specialties with greater mental/emotional orientation, such as psychiatry, are more successful in achieving patient satisfaction than specialties with a stronger manual orientation, such as surgery.

A total of 27 physicians were randomly selected from different medical orientation. They were requested to use their commonsense to rate the specialties under study depending on whether they were more mentally oriented or manually inclined. They were also asked to indicate which groups of specialties are likely to be more successful in achieving patient satisfaction from clinical interaction. Another sample of 561 patients was selected from nine different medical specialties different medical specialties clinics based on a quota sampling method. Patients were asked to complete a 15 items. Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire following their clinical interviews with their physicians.

The results obtained from the patients did not fully corporate the results of the physicians’ questionnaire, which predicted greatest patient satisfaction from psychiatrists. Our result showed that pediatricians and gynecologists were more successful in achieving patient satisfaction (P<0.001) than psychiatrists.

Patients satisfaction with different medical specialties is different from physicians’ common-sense assumptions. Patients were more satisfied with pediatricians and gynecologists rather than psychiatrists.