SOUL/BODY: Which Doctors Will Annoy Their Patients?

by Sheldon Lewis

A close look at the records of 3,424 physicians who took the Medical Council of Canada’s clinical skills exam, a test of patient–physician communication skills, from 1993 to 1996, revealed that a total of 1,116 patient complaints had been filed with regulatory agencies. Which doctors got these complaints? Robyn Tamblyn, Ph.D., scientific director of McGill University’s Clinical and Health Informatics research unit, says that a disproportionate number were leveled against physicians who scored in the lowest 25 percent on communication skills.

“Low scores on the exam were quite predictive,” said Tamblyn. “The higher your score, the less likely you would get complaints.” And this held true for physicians of either sex and for foreign as well as Canadian medical school graduates.
“The good news is that this type of testing could be done much earlier and we could make things better for all physicians and patients,” she says. “We could even make it part of the admission procedures to medical school. We need to have physicians who can communicate better, and we should select not just on the basis of I.Q., but of emotional I.Q.”