General Practitioner’s Personality type and chronic illnesses diagnosis. A cross sectional study

Ileana Gefaell, Sara Ares-Blanco, Marina Guisado-Clavero, Laura Calvo García, Marta Castelo Jurado, Patricia Fernandez Crespo, Ana Peñalver, Marta Pérez-Álvarez, Maria Soledad Kassem, Irene Martínez Negro, Lourdes Ramos Del Río

Keywords: Personality Inventory, Physicians, Primary Care, diagnosis, Chronic Disease

Background:

Some studies have related the personality type with the physician´s specialties choice or the patient’s diseases. The Five-Factor Model of personality, is useful describing personality. We can identify: extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism types. Agreeableness, introvert personality types in medical schools, are more likely to end up as general practitioners (GPs).
GPs face with patients’ chronic diseases because of continuity of care, and personality might have a role in the diagnosis of the patient’s illnesses as it influences on decision making. For instance, neurotic GPs have shown more anxiety due to uncertainty in their practice. Still the role of GP personality in the medical care of chronic patients is unknown

Research questions:

Is there an association between the GP personality and higher prevalence of some type of chronic diseases in their practice?

Method:

Multicentric cross-sectional study in Madrid city (Spain) in the first semester of 2023. Target population: GP and adults who were assigned to this GP for at least 1 year.
Primary outcome: Prevalence of chronic diseases in the patients assigned to this GP for at least 1 year according their personality test.
Variables: GP characteristics: sociodemographic, time working in the same practice, individual area of interest in medicine, personality test: Big Five Inventory, Spanish version. Patient´s characteristics: sex, age, presence of: DM, cardiovascular diseases (coronary heart disease, stroke, heart failure) psyquiatric diseases (anxiety and depression), arthrosis and joint pain.
Data will be extracted from the electronic health record and Consultaweb database program. Analysis: Descriptive analysis. The relationship between GP´s personality and patient chronic diseases will be analyzed with multivariate logistic regression.

Results:

The hypothesis of this project is an expected relation between the type of personality of the GPs and the frequency of patient’s chronic disease. This could help to make a better approach to the diseases in the future.

Conclusions:

Points for discussion:

Does our personality influence on the diagnosis of the diseases of our patients?

If we knew our personality type, would our approach to patients be different?

Would our patient´s personalities interfere in the results of the study?

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