A good rest makes a caring doctor: Linking physicians’ nonwork time recovery to patient-centered communication with nonwork-to-work enrichment and empathy

Abstract

As an ideal form of patient-physician communication, patient-centered communication (PCC) is linked with various desired health and relationship outcomes, raising the need to promote PCC practices among physicians. However, how factors within physicians' daily work and life contexts are associated with PCC remains largely unknown. Based on the work-home resource (PCC) model, we proposed and tested a mediation path model linking nonwork time recovery—the restoration of resources during leisure time—to physicians’ PCC. This study has revealed that nonwork time recovery was indirectly and positively associated with PCC by analyzing quota-sampled data collected among physicians. The association is drawn by 1) the sequential mediation of nonwork-to-work enrichment (NWE), 2) the transfer of instrumental and affective resources from nonwork to work domain, and 3) two dimensions of empathy, i.e., perspective-taking as the cognitive dimension and empathetic concern as the affective dimension. This study contributes to the patient-physician communication literature by revealing the mechanism of how work-nonwork synergy may benefit high-quality patient-physician communication from a resource-based perspective.