Professional attitudes of doctors and medical teaching

The attitude of doctors towards the profession influences to a large extent a number of aspects of clinical competence. Their attitude towards the patient is particularly important as it determines the quality of communication. There is reason to believe that a certain number of practising clinicians have not acquired the appropriate attitude to their patients and the skills in communicating that this entails in spite of specific undergraduate education programmes. This would warrant more and different attention to this subject by medical schools than is actually the case. The recently introduced scale of attitudes between doctor-centred, disease-oriented and patient-centred, problem-oriented could provide a basis for studying, teaching and evaluating individual attitudes of students.