Repairing "Difficult" Patient-Clinician Relationships.

Annotated Bibliography “Difficult” Clinician-Patient Relationships

BREATHE OUT: a randomized controlled trial of a structured intervention to improve clinician satisfaction with "difficult" visits.

PURPOSE Difficult patients comprise at least 15% of ambulatory visits and are associated with clinician burnout. No structured procedure has been reported to assist health care practitioners with these challenging relationships. This randomized trial evaluated whether a pre- and postvisit patient-centered and clinician-reflective technique called BREATHE OUT improved clinician satisfaction duri...

Countertransference reactions to adolescents with eating disorders: relationships to clinician and patient factors.

OBJECTIVE Clinical report suggests that therapists have strong and sometimes difficult-to-manage reactions to patients with eating disorders (EDs); however, systematic research is largely absent. The purpose of this study was to explore the emotional responses, or countertransference (CT) reactions, clinicians experience when working with patients with EDs, and to identify clinician, patient, a...

Do Physicians Have an Ethical Duty to Repair Relationships with So-Called "Difficult" Patients?

This essay argues that physicians hold primary ethical responsibility for repairing damaged patient-physician relationships. The first section establishes that the patient-physician relationship has an important influence on patient health and argues that physicians' duty to treat should be understood as including a responsibility to repair broken relationships, regardless of which party was "r...

Primary care for patient complexity, not only disease.

Primary care is increasingly geared toward standardized care and decision-making for common chronic conditions, combinations of medical and mental health conditions, and the behavioral aspects of care for those conditions. Yet even with well-integrated team-based care for health conditions in place, some patients do not engage or respond as well as clinicians would wish or predict. This trouble...