Patients Attitudes towards Clinical Interviews in Various Fields of Medical Specialties

Although the physician-patient 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 psy-chiatry more successful in achieving patient satisfaction than other specialties. However, the validity of such assumptions has rarely been assessed scientifically. The current study was de-signed to find out whether medical specialties with greater men-tal/emotional orientation, such as psychiatry, are more successful in achieving patient satisfaction than specialties with a stronger manual orientation, such as surgery. Methods: A total of 27 physicians were randomly selected from different medical orientations. They were requested to use their common-sense to rate the specialties under study depend-ing on whether they were more mentally oriented or manually inclined. They were also asked to indicate which groups of spe-cialties are likely to be more successful in achieving patient sat-isfaction from clinical interactions. Another sample of 561 pa-tients was selected from nine different medical specialty clinics based on a quota sample method. Patients were asked to com-plete a 15-item Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire fol-lowing their clinical interviews with their physicians. Results: The results obtained from the patients did not fully cor-roborate the results of the physicians questionnaire, which pre-dicted greatest patient satisfaction from psychiatrists. Our results showed that pediatricians and gynecologists were more success-ful in achieving patient satisfaction (P 0.001) than psychiatrists. Conclusion: Patientsپf satisfaction with different medical spe-cialties is different from physiciansپf common-sense assump-tions. Patients were more satisfied with pediatricians and gy-necologists rather than psychiatrists. Iran J Med Sci 2009; 34(1): 53-60.