General practitioners’ patient-centredness and responses to patients’ emotional cues and concerns: relationships with perceived empathy in areas of high and low socioeconomic deprivation

摘要

Background Physician empathy is important to patients across the socio-economic spectrum. However, whether socioeconomic status (SES) influences how patients’ judge physician empathy is not known. We investigated how patients’ perceptions of their general practitioners’ (GPs) empathy related to objectively measured patient-centeredness of the GPs and their detection and response to emotional cues.