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Medical Students' Attitudes toward Patient‐centered Care and Standardized Patients' Perceptions of Humanism: A Link between Attitudes and Outcomes

The physician–patient relationship is central to the delivery of high-quality medical care and has been shown to affect patient satisfaction and a variety of other biological, psychological, and social outcomes. Patient-centered care is one aspect of the physician–patient relationship that takes into account patients’ preferences, concerns, and emotions and has been proposed as a mechanism through which favorable patient outcomes are achieved. In recent years, medical educators have recognized the importance of patient-centered care by instituting a variety of curricula to teach communication skills, professional values, and patient-centered behaviors to medical students. Despite the presence of such curricula, we recently demonstrated that medical students have less patientcentered attitudes in later years of medical school. Our quantitative results augment a large body of qualitative and ethnographic data that suggest that the culture of medical education emphasizes biomedical issues at the expense of patients’ preferences, concerns, and emotions. However, few data exist regarding the clinical significance of students’ patient-centered attitudes. Understanding the clinical significance of students’ attitudes is critical in the present context of ongoing debate about the relative merits of teaching attitudes versus skills in order to promote greater patient-centered care and improve patients’ outcomes. In this study, we explored associations between students’ attitudes toward patient-centered care and standardized patients’ perceptions of humanism, a construct commonly included in patient-satisfaction outcome measures.