Physicians' knowledge of and response to patients' problems.

The purposes of the study were: 1) to describe the extent of the physician's knowledge and his response; 2) to measure the degree of correlation among four indicators of knowledge and among four indicators of response; and 3) to measure the association between physician's knowledge and his response. There were five physicians and 299 patients in the study. All the patients had at least one chronic condition and one current complaint. The four indicators referred to the four kinds of problems considered: discomfort, worry, disturbance of daily living, and social problems. The physicians had high percentages of perfect scores on knowledge of discomfort, worry, and disturbance of daily living, but a low percentage on knowledge of social problems. Scores on response to discomfort were high but were low on response to other aspects. The correlations between knowledge and response, although statistically significant, were low for all four types of problems. It is possible that these correlations were underestimated because the physician's responses were recorded only for the three-month period of the study.