Extrovert GPs 'best at job'

GPs need to build a rapport with their patients

GPs are likely to be more successful if they have an open and extrovert personality, research suggests.

A team of researchers carried out personality and performance tests on 187 NHS doctors applying to train in general practice in the Trent region.

They found that the personality attributes were most closely associated with successful doctoring were:

• a positive and enthusiastic approach to life
• being naturally responsive to people and highly receptive to your environment
• good communication skills
• having a natural affinity for complexity and ambiguity

Doctors who were more introvert and withdrawn tended to spend too much time worrying.

In the past medical schools have assumed that if students have the required clinical knowledge, then they will make good doctors

Tim Norfolk

Researcher Tim Norfolk, of the Institute for Work Psychology, University of Sheffield, told BBC News Online that GPs had a very short space of time in which to determine what was wrong with a patient, and act accordingly.

Therefore, it was important that they had the skills needed to put a patient at their ease so they were more likely to provide all the necessary information to make an accurate diagnosis.

Compensation

He said that if a doctor was not naturally extrovert, they could compensate effectively by learning other skills, such as the ability to listen sympathetically.

Mr Norfolk said: "In the past medical schools have assumed that if students have the required clinical knowledge, then they will make good doctors, but that is by no means always the case.

"If you do not have the necessarily skills, either innate or learned, to be able to draw all the information you need out of a patient, then you will have to make a diagnosis based on only 40-50% of the relevant facts."

It is estimated that 50% of all problems that patients have are never picked by their GP, and that 90% of all psycho-social issues are never referred on the relevant experts.

Mr Norfolk said the onus was on both medical schools and individual doctors to ensure that sufficient importance was given to the development of inter-personal skills.

The research was presented on Thursday at the British Psychological Society's occupational psychology conference in Blackpool.