Identifying Patient Centeredness in Students of Healthcare Professions

Introduction: As partners, patients must be seen clinically and also from emotional, mental, spiritual and social perspectives. Patient centered care involves shared decision making and addresses their specific health needs and desired health outcomes. Encouraging a patient centered attitude is necessary in training health care professionals. The Patient Practitioner Orientation Scale (PPOS) assesses such attitudes within the health professionals and patient relationship. Objectives: To identify patient centric attitudes of health professional students. To compare attitudes between students from different healthcare courses. Methodology: This cross-sectional study involved 296 students (122 MBBS, 95 nursing and 79 physiotherapy students) from NRI medical college, Guntur. After obtaining IEC clearance and informed consent, they were administered the PPOS questionnaire (permission obtained from author). The data collected was entered in MS- Excel and expressed in percentages. Important findings were subjected to ?t? test and single factor ANOVA at 5% level of significance. Results: The overall mean score was 61.8 (highest score - 108) where 159 students (53.7%) had scores below average. There was no significant difference between male (62.6) and female students (61.5). However, physiotherapy students had a significantly higher patient centric score (mean score 64.5, p .0008). Discussion: Like in this study, other studies have shown healthcare students to have low patient centered attitudes. It is postulated here that physiotherapy students are more practically involved with their patients and therefore the higher scores. Conclusion: Patient centeredness enhances healthcare quality. Efforts must be made to inculcate patient centeredness in healthcare professionals.