Empathy, burn-out and the use of gut feeling: a cross-sectional survey of Danish general practitioners

Abstract

ObjectiveResearch has suggested that physicians’ gut feelings are associated with parents’ concerns for the well-being of their children. Gut feeling is particularly important in diagnosis of serious low-incidence diseases in primary care. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine whether empathy, that is, the ability to understand what another person is experiencing, relates to general practitioners’ (GPs) use of gut feelings. Since empathy is associated with burn-out, we also examined whether the hypothesised influence of empathy on gut feeling use is dependent on level of burn-out.DesignCross-sectional questionnaire survey. Participants completed the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy and The Maslach Burnout Inventory.SettingPrimary care.Participants588 active GPs in Central Denmark Region (response rate=70%).Primary outcome measuresSelf-reported use of gut feelings in clinical practice.ResultsGPs who scored in the highest quartile of the empathy scale had fourfold the odds of increased use of gut feelings compared with GPs in the lowest empathy quartile (OR 3.99, 95% CI 2.51 to 6.34) when adjusting for the influence of possible confounders. Burn-out was not statistically significantly associated with use of gut feelings (OR 1.29, 95% CI 0.90 to 1.83), and no significant interaction effects between empathy and burn-out were revealed.ConclusionsPhysician empathy, but not burn-out, was strongly associated with use of gut feelings in primary care. As preliminary results suggest that gut feelings have diagnostic value, these findings highlight the importance of incorporating empathy and interpersonal skills into medical training to increase sensitivity to patient concern and thereby increase the use and reliability of gut feeling.

Patient–physician relationship and use of gut feeling in cancer diagnosis in primary care: a cross-sectional survey of patients and their general practitioners

“…Thus, in one study of 3890 children presenting in primary care, parental concern strongly influenced the GPs’ GF about serious infections in the children 9. In line with this, we have found that GPs who score high on empathy and, hypothetically are more sensitive to patients’ concerns, reported to use GF in their daily practice to a higher degree than GPs who scored low 10. It is not known whether high empathy is associated with higher use of GF in cancer diagnosis.…”

Characteristics and predictors of burnout among healthcare professionals: a cross-sectional study in two tertiary hospitals

“…While the overall prevalence of burnout was estimated to range from 2.6% to 69.9%, emotional exhaustion (EE) was observed in 8.7–63.2%, depersonalisation (DP) in 8.5–52% and low personal accomplishment (PA) in 4.4–73.3%. 8–34 Burnout prevalence varies among different subgroups of physicians (eg, general practitioners, anaesthetists, senior doctors and dentists).…”

Cross-sectional study of the association between empathy and burnout and drug prescribing quality in primary care

“…Our group has undertaken several studies to analyze the impact of burnout and empathy among general practitioners (GPs) and nurses on different aspects of primary care practice (Yuguero et al, 2017a). Moreover, this relation between empathy and burnout has also been described in other countries (Sun et al, 2017;Pedersen et al, 2018) and in other health care groups among emergency professionals (Yuguero et al, 2017a), psychiatrists (Bentley et al, 2018) and intensive care professionals (van Mol et al, 2015). In all cases, high empathy has been described as a contributing factor of burnout prevention.…”