A Sign That Doctors Care More for Their Patients Than Themselves?

The Atlantic:

Here’s proof that doctors care more about their patients’ safety than their own. A study has found that doctors tended to ignore signs asking them to wash their hands for the sake of their own health; When they were reminded that not washing put their patients’ health at risk, they were far more willing to oblige.

Whatever was going through the doctors’ minds, an appeal to patient safety got their attention much better than an appeal to their personal safety. Soap use rose by over 45 percent.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina were interested in what type of message would be most effective at increasing doctors’ hand washing. They thought that messages emphasizing patient risk would work better than messages emphasizing doctors’ own risk and set out to test this by using different signs in a U.S. hospital.

Read the whole story: The Atlantic

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