Staff competencies and patient care effectiveness in primary healthcare (pilot study)

Abstract

Background: The aim of the study was to determine the correlation between hard and soft competences of primary care physicians and the effectiveness of patient care, which may be of significant importance both in the process of managing medical entities and in order to take appropriate actions aimed at increasing the effectiveness of care. Methods: The population studied in this study were primary care physicians employed at the Medical and Diagnostic Center (MDC) in Siedlce, Poland. In the study, doctors' qualifications were measured by the number of specializations held by a physician, and experience was measured by the total number of years of work as a doctor and the length of work as a specialist at MDC (in years). The data was collected in a questionnaire survey. Physicians' social competences were measured by the Social Competence Profile (PROKOS). As there are no measures of treatment effectiveness at the level of individual workplaces, apart from measuring patient satisfaction, its original definition was adopted and 14 indexes were developed, which were calculated on the basis of anonymized data from CMD information systems. Results: The social competences of the surveyed primary care physicians were clearly lower than the competences of the doctors surveyed in the standardization study. The exception was social activism. The scales of individual dimensions of social competences were characterized by very high reliability. The individual dimensions of soft skills of all surveyed primary care physicians were strongly correlated with each other. The overall work experience and work experience of primary care physicians at MDC, analyzed under hard competences, showed no correlation. The factor analysis performed for 14 original indexes of effectiveness showed that 5 of the original indexes created a very reliable scale. Conclusions: The selection of a strong scale consisting of five original effectiveness indexes is a step towards the development of a uniform index of the effectiveness of patient care in primary care, which will be a significant contribution to science.