Physician Communication Attitudes and Success in Patient-doctor Communication Amongst Medical School Students

The aim of this research paper is to assess the issue of difficulty in verbal communication amongst medical practitioners and their patients. In recent years, the push for efficiency and speed has caused physicians to decrease the time they spend with their patients. This push for efficiency has caused a strain in the healthy development of physician-patient relationships. Therefore, hospitals and clinics are suffering from a decrease of patient satisfaction and loss of customers and revenue. Previous studies have been done to assess the use of implementing techniques from the hospitality industry and having a more humanistic approach to health care in order to solve this problem (Kaplan, Greenfield, & Ware, 1989). Our study exams medical school students from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Medicine. The students were evaluated based on scores from the Objective Structured Clinical Examination and compared with attitude surveys they had taken before the exam. We will be using a regression model and scatter plot regression graph to analyze our date. By using previous literature we predicted that medical school students who believed that patients should control the conversation during patient examination would have a higher OSCE score. We also believe that we should see a similar trend of increase of OSCE scores for students that believe psychosocial factors should be discussed more during patient examination. We concluded that our results were insignificant due to a small sample size, although our correlation results confirmed our hypothesis that a more humanistic approach results in better patient satisfaction and recovery outcomes