Difficult physician-patient encounters

Managing Difficult Encounters: Understanding Physician, Patient, and Situational Factors <FEFF>[Query: Should Difficult Patient Encounters be changed to Difficult Clinical Encounters for consistency with the text?]

D ifficult encounters are estimated to represent 15 to 30 percent of family physician visits. Factors contributing to these difficult clinical encounters may be related to the physician, patient, situation, or a combination. Physicians can recognize these visits as challenging by acknowledging their feelings of angst or helplessness generated during the conversation. These encounters are also c...

Physician-patient encounters "on a darkling plain.

Does computer use in patient-physician encounters influence patient satisfaction?

OBJECTIVE To assess whether computer use by physicians during the patient-physician encounter influences patient satisfaction in a family medicine teaching centre. DESIGN Cross-sectional mailed survey. SETTING Queen's University Family Medicine Centre in Kingston, Ont. PARTICIPANTS A random sample of 300 patients from the family medicine centre, all of whom were older than 18 years of age...

How respected family physicians manage difficult patient encounters.

BACKGROUND Nearly all family physicians have patients that engender a sense of frustration or dislike, often described as "difficult." Most research in this area focuses on describing these patients and their physicians, not management or coping. OBJECTIVE To describe how respected family physicians identify, manage, and cope with difficult patient encounters. METHODS Qualitative semi-struc...

Techniques for terminating patient-physician encounters in primary care settings.

BACKGROUND Physicians in the community work on a tight and often pressured schedule; verbal and non-verbal techniques to terminate the patient-physician encounter are therefore necessary. OBJECTIVES To characterize ways of terminating the encounter. METHODS Using a structured questionnaire we observed seven family physicians and nine consultants and recorded patient-physician encounters to ...