Doctor’s Communication Skills and Mode of Communication as Determinants of Quality Patient Care Management in Two Selected Teaching Hospitals in Southwest Nigeria

Abstract

Quality patient care management is a systematic way to measuring, recording, monitoring, and continually improving efficiency, accessibility to high-quality healthcare, and patient satisfaction. Doctors in the teaching hospitals are at the center of research activities since intense patient care management are usually carried out by them. Previous studies have found that doctors seem not to be working towards quality patient care management in their teaching hospitals which could largely be attributed to certain factors such as doctor’s communication skills and doctors’ mode of communication. Using descriptive research design of the correlational type, the population comprised 658 doctors in two teaching hospitals namely Ekiti State University teaching hospital (EKSUTH) and OBAFEMI AWOLOWO UNIVERSITY TEACHING HOSPITAL (OAUTHC). Two stage stratified sampling technique (proportional type) was used to select samples from the population of the three doctors cadre in the two selected teaching hospitals. A sample fraction of 3/10 was used across all the cadre to get a total size of 197 for both selected teaching hospitals. A self-structured questionnaire comprising five sections was validated. Out of the 197 copies of the questionnaire administered, 187 representing 94.9% were retrieved and used for analysis. Descriptive statistics of frequency counts, percentages and means were used to analyze the research questions, while correlation and regression were used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. There is positive weak relationship between doctors’ communication skills and quality patient care management (r = 0.357, p< 0.05). Doctors’ communication skills, and doctors mode of communication play vital roles in quality patient care management. Associations have been identified between these factors and quality patient care management. It is established by the study that doctors’ communication skills and modes monotonically influenced quality patient care management. Doctors’ communication skills and modes of doctor’s communication has positive effect while no effect on the quality of patient care management. Therefore, it is recommended that the hospital should channel more efforts and resources to improve the standard of communication skills of the doctors.