Impact of Physician Mindfulness on Patient Care Quality: A Study from an Indian Corporate Hospital

This study investigates the association between physician mindfulness and patient care quality within a corporate hospital in India. Through review of global and Indian literature from two decades via Google Scholar and Scopus, we formulated a research framework. This framework used the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) to evaluate physician mindfulness, integrated with the PPCL (Patient’s Perception of Patient Centeredness scale) used to assess patient interactions. The FFMQ measures physician mindfulness across five dimensions: observation, description, acting with awareness, non-judgment, and non-reactivity. The PPCL evaluates communication elements including hurried interactions, elicited concern, explanation of results, decision-making, interpersonal style, and perceived discrimination by physicians from patients' perspective. The study sampled 50 specialist orthopaedic physicians and 50 patient caregivers from a corporate hospital through convenience sampling. Data analysis included internal consistency checks, descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and regression analysis using ANOVA and t-tests in MS Excel 2011. Our findings show the framework accounted for 49.77% of physician mindfulness variance. Regardless of experience, physicians exhibited mindfulness traits, except for non-judgment, observation, and acting with awareness. Patients reported hurried communication and poor interpersonal style, adversely affecting physician-patient relationships. Physicians showed reactive and judgmental communication, inadequately explaining diagnoses and treatments. Implementing mindfulness initiatives for physicians and staff may enable mindful clinical practice, enhancing patient care and satisfaction. This approach could establish physician-patient-centric disease management, transitioning from the existing patient-disease model.