What do humble doctors do? A conceptualization of clinician humility from the patient's perspective.

Abstract

Humility is a desirable trait for clinicians (e.g., physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants), but it can be difficult to achieve. Although commentary and empirical studies on clinician humility exist, the literature has overlooked what exactly constitutes a humble clinician through the patients' eyes. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study explored clinician humility from the patient's perspective. Participants (N = 326; 42.1% female; Mage = 40.65, SDage = 11.73) listed humble behaviors that their clinician displayed and evaluated their clinician's overall humility through an online survey. All participants were from the United States of America. Participants rated their clinician favorably on humility, M = 4.06, SD = 0.94 (on a 1-5 scale). Through thematic analyses, we created five themes about clinician humility: approachability, respect for patient, nonverbal communication, patient-focus, and acknowledgement of limitations. The themes coincide with facets of humility within the literature and overlap with important strategies to improve the clinician-patient relationship. Clinician humility may serve as a useful framework to categorize important clinician behaviors in the medical interaction. Instead of attempting to remember a myriad of concepts, one may need to keep in mind a modest unifying notion: "be humble".