Keywords: Personality Inventory, Primary Care, Burn out, Patient-Centered Care, Empathy, Resilience

Background:

The GP personality traits - extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism- may influence on burn-out, resilience, continuity of care, patient centred care and empathy towards patients.

Research questions:

Is there an association between the GP personality traits and burn-out or resilience?
Is there an association between the GP personality traits and patient centred care or empathy towards patients?

Method:

Design: Multicentric cross-sectional survey-based study in 9 European countries (Israel, Greece, Hungary, North Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, and Turkey) in the first semester of January 2026. Population: GPs and Family medicine residents in clinical practice. Primary outcome: Prevalence of burn-out, resilience, patient centred care or empathy towards patients according to their personality test.
Variables:
GP characteristics: sociodemographic, time working in the same practice, years of experience, role as a GP (mentor, manager, medical practice), additional roles in practice (research, professor, volunteer, active part in scientific societies).
Characteristics of Health care centre: Location (rural/urban), socioeconomic level of the area.
Measurement scales (Likert): personality test: Big Five Questionnaire (60 item version); Brief resilience coping scale: 4-item; Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI): 22-item; Patient-centred communication: 6-item; Empathy scale: 13-item.
Recruitment: convenience sampling.
Sample size: 600 GPs in total
Analysis: Descriptive analysis. Regression Model analysis.

Results:

This is the continuation of the GP personality study. The hypothesis of this project is an expected association between the certain personality traits in the GPs and burnout, resilience, patient centred care and empathy. More specifically, we expect that GPs with higher scores in neuroticism have a higher score in burnout and lesser coping mechanisms, and GPs with higher scores in agreeableness and conscientiousness will have higher scores in the patient centred and empathy scales.

Conclusions:

A better understanding of the role of personality in burnout, patient centred care might help clinicians to deepen their insights into their abilities to pursue a better practice.

Points for discussion:

If we knew our personality type, would our approach to patients be different?

How could we measure the influence of practice on our personality?

The GP personality study team is growing; do you want to join our study?