How can tomorrow's doctors be more caring? A phenomenological investigation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONTEXT: Peabody's maxim 'the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient' inspired generations of doctors to relate humanely to patients. Since then, phrases such as 'managed care' have impersonalised caring. The term 'patient-centred' was introduced to re-personalise caring. Ironically, however, such terms have been defined by professionals' preconceptions rather than patients' experiences. Using patients' experiences of doctors being (un)caring to guide doctors' learning could reinvigorate caring. Interpretive phenomenology provides qualitative research tools with which to do this. METHODS: Ten patients, purposively selected to have broad experiences of primary, secondary and tertiary health care, consented to participate. To stay close to their lived experiences, participants first drew 'Pictor' diagrams to represent relationships between themselves and professionals during remembered experiences of (un)caring. A researcher then used the depictions to structure in-depth, one-to-one explorations of the lived experience of caring. Verbatim transcripts were analysed using template analysis. To remain very close to patients' experiences, the researchers assembled a narrative description of the phenomenon of caring using participants' own words. RESULTS: Caring doctors were genuine. They allowed their own individuality to interact with patients' individuality. This made participants feel recognised as individuals, not just diseases. Caring doctors listened and spoke carefully, encouraged expressions of emotion, were accessible and responsive, and formed relationships. These factors empowered participants to be actively involved in their own care. Little things like smiling, shaking hands, admitting uncertainty, asking a colleague for advice and calling a participant unexpectedly at home showed that doctors were prepared to 'go above and beyond'. This was caring. CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide medical educators with an interpretation of caring that is truly patient-centred. Coupling technical proficiency with human qualities - being genuinely empathic and respectful - within doctor-patient relationships is the essence of caring.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".