◆Research findings by Shigemi Morishita, a second-year doctoral student in the medical program at the Graduate School of Medicine, and a research group led by Professor Noriaki Sada of the Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Faculty of Medicine, have been published in "Rheumatology".
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Could a doctor's perfectionist personality be a barrier to collaborative decision-making with patients?
Research findings by Shigemi Morishita, a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Medicine, and a research group led by Professor Noriaki Sada of the Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Faculty of Medicine, have been published in the international academic journal "Rheumatology," published by Oxford University Press.
In recent years, shared decision-making (SDM), where doctors and patients jointly decide on treatment plans, has become increasingly important in the medical field. However, it was previously unknown whether a doctor's personality influences this SDM process.
This study used data from the TRUM2-SLE study, a multicenter collaborative study involving systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) patients and the physicians involved in their care at five facilities nationwide, to examine how the "Big Five personality traits," one of the personality traits of physicians, relate to shared decision-making (SDM) as assessed by patients.
This study involved 493 registered SLE patients and their 43 attending physicians. Physician personality traits were assessed using the "Ten-Item Personality Inventory - Japanese version (TIPI-J)," and patient-led SDM (Shared Decision Making) was evaluated using the "SDM-Q-9 scale." The results revealed that physicians with higher levels of conscientiousness and neuroticism among five personality traits tended to have lower SDM scores for their patients. These traits can be grouped together as "perfectionism." Clustering analysis divided the physicians into three clusters, and this "perfectionism" cluster was identified, confirming its association with SDM. These results suggest that a perfectionistic personality in physicians may be a barrier to the practice of SDM.
This study provides important insights that suggest the need to consider the internal characteristics of physicians themselves in order to improve the quality of shared decision-making (SDM) with patients, and its application to healthcare professional education is expected.
[Paper Information]
*This paper is open access and can be freely downloaded from here.