Basic Science Medical Student Attitudes toward the Patient-Doctor Relationship

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Introduction: Patients seem increasingly to be in favor of taking a more active role in the patient-doctor relationship. Increasing education and the rising prevalence of chronic and lifestyle diseases require patients to take more responsibility for their health. The present study was conducted among basic science students at a private medical school in Aruba, Dutch Caribbean using the well validated patient-practitioner orientation scale (PPOS) to obtain information on student attitudes toward the patient-doctor-relationship and study whether the attitudes were associated with demographic characteristics. Methods: The study was conducted during November 2016. PPOS measures student attitudes towards the sharing and caring dimensions of the patient-doctor relationship by noting the respondents' degree of agreement with various statements using a Likert-type scale.The gender, age, nationality and semester of study of the respondents were noted. Three binary dependent variables were created using mean caring, mean sharing and mean total scores where mean score of 4 and greater was coded as 1 and otherwise was coded as 0. Subsequently, univariate and multivariate logistic regression models were fitted to analyze the relationship of the dependent variables with gender, age, nationality and semester of study of the respondents. Results: One hundred and seven of the total of 116 students (92.2%) participated in the study.The mean ± SD sharing score was 3.996 ± 0.623 while the mean caring score was 4.253 ± 0.0602. The mean ± SD total score was 4.126 ± 0.501.The mean sharing and mean total scores were significantly higher among female respondents. Female respondents were found to be more likely to be caring, sharing and having a more patient-centered attitude when communicating with patients than males on carrying out the logistic regression analysis. Conclusions: The scores were comparable to those reported previously in the literature. Compared to some other studies no significant differences in scores were noted according to demographic characteristics of respondents other than gender. Studies among students during the clinical years of study are required. Similar studies could be carried out in other offshore Caribbean medical schools.