What makes a good doctor? The ability to regurgitate dense medical knowledge and make the correct diagnosis. But also compassion and of course resilience.
However, there are a few more qualities that make a good doctor.
Compassion
The exercise of compassion is an essential component of good medical care in many situations and requires a foundation of moral principles. What is understanding? It is not merely knowledge or understanding. “In a sentence, understanding is the ability to think and act with what one knows.”
Empathy
In simple terms, empathy manifests as warmth. In more academic terms, empathy is “a socio-emotional capacity that has two distinct components. One affective, the ability to share the emotions of others, and the other cognitive. The ability to understand the emotions of others ”, according to the authors of a recent paper on the subject.
In other words, empathy is an emotional identification of both the heart and the mind.
According to the results of one study, physicians who displayed non-verbal empathic behavior, such as eye contact, smiling, and uncrossed arms, were perceived as warmer and more competent
Honesty
Being honest with patients should be easy, just part of the routine.
According to a study; “Some physicians may not tell patients the whole truth, to avoid upsetting them or causing them to lose hope,” the survey authors wrote.
However, “studies of communication with seriously ill patients show that patients prefer honest and accurate information, provided with empathy and understanding on the part of physicians, even when prognoses are dire.”
Competence
“When measuring physician quality, we could focus on ‘soft’ skills such as empathy, which we can measure through surveys of the patient experience.”
“But we also have to focus on intellectual skills, such as the ability to make difficult diagnoses and emotional intelligence, the ability to collaborate and lead teams effectively. We don’t really measure these things at all, wrongly assuming that all doctors have them. “
Commitment
You are probably a physician committed to his profession, to his patients, and to continuous self-improvement. That’s good news because committed physicians, who feel that the medical profession is not just a job, but a vocation, may be less likely to experience burnout.
Courage
The term often used in medicine is moral courage. “Moral courage can be defined as the voluntary will to defend and act in accordance with one’s own ethical beliefs despite the barriers that may inhibit the ability to proceed towards the correct action.
That courage is critical to physicians’ commitment to acting in the best interest of patients.
Respect
Finally, patients are generally aware of how much their physician respects them. Doctors who have respect for their particular patients provide more information and have a more positive effect on visits.
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