ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Med.
Sec. Family Medicine and Primary Care
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1647105
Bridging the Trust Gap: The Mediating Role of Patient Satisfaction in Physician Empathy
Provisionally accepted
- Jiangxi University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Nanchang, China
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To explore the mediating effect of patient-perceived physician empathy on patient trust and patient satisfaction. The data of 834 outpatients in a top-three hospital in Jiangxi province were collected, and the general data questionnaire, diagnosis and treatment relationship empathy scale, patient trust scale and PDRQ-15 scale were used to investigate the relationship between variables, and the mediation effect was analyzed by process. There was a significant positive correlation between doctors' empathy and patients' trust. Patient satisfaction plays a partial mediating role between perceived physician empathy and patient trust.Physician empathy affects patient trust partly through patient satisfaction. On the basis of ensuring the quality of outpatient treatment, hospitals should strive to improve the doctor's visiting ability and service quality, so as to improve the patient's medical experience and satisfaction level, and thus ease the doctor-patient relationship.
Keywords: Physician empathy, Patient Satisfaction, Patient trust, Doctor-patient relationship, Medical environment
Received: 16 Jun 2025; Accepted: 18 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 BAI, Li and He. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Fei Li, Jiangxi University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Nanchang, China
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