An assessment of Portuguese health service users' perceptions of whether doctors' age and gender affect their willingness to communicate with patients.

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Introduction: This study aims to analyze the impact of doctors' age and gender on their predisposition to communication, from the perspective of patients with atopic dermatitis. Methods: Two studies were carried out. The qualitative study followed the logic of interpretivism with collective interviews with a sample of 19 people with atopic dermatitis living in the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto; the quantitative study focused on the positivist perspective with the development of questionnaire surveys with a sample of 144 people with atopic dermatitis living throughout the country. Results: The results obtained point to a non-conscious influence of the variables being analyzed by the sample studied. In particular, 63 per cent and 53 per cent of those interviewed considered that the doctor's gender and age (respectively) had no influence on their willingness to communicate with the patient. However, in the quantitative study, the results point to a statistically significant relationship between: a) age and gender, c) gender and doctors' communication. No statistically significant relationship was found between age (regardless of gender) and predisposition to communicate. In other words, the older the female doctors, the more they are perceived as being.