Correlation between personality traits and caregiver skills in medical students: the FMCB-UAlg 14th MIM cohort case

Everyone has a singular way of understanding, thinking, and relating to the self and its surrounding environment. Together, these traits form one’s personality. The Five-Factor Model of personality comprises five personality domains: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to experience, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, which can be assessed by psychometric questionnaires such as the NEO-Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI©). Personality traits influence medical students’ lives and work, having been correlated to academic performance, specialty choice, doctor-patient relationship,etc. Besides personality, doctors’ performance is tightly linked to their caregiver profile.s It is therefore crucial to understand the personality and caregiver profiles of today’s medical students in order to form high quality doctors for the future. Hence, in this exploratory study we aimed to characterise and correlate the personality and caregiver traits of the FMCB-UAlg 14th MIM cohort. For that, we applied a socio-demographic questionnaire and two validated instruments (NEO-FFI© and CUIDA©). Data analyses were performed on IBM SPSSTM. Our study sample consisted of 30 3rd year medical student ( 42.9% of the cohort), with an age mean of 29.73 years, of which 83.3% were females. The sample’s strongest personality traits are Agreeableness (Median=48.00), Conscientiousness (Median=46.50) and Openness to experience (Median=45.00). Regarding the caregiver traits, the sample presents high scores on Flexibility (Median=7.00), Empathy (Median=7.00) and Openness (Median=6.00), linked to Sensibility to others. From the five personality traits, Agreeableness was the one correlating positively with more caregiver traits. This study reveals new findings on the socio-demographic, personality and caregiver characteristics of medical students from a Portuguese post-graduate medical school.Further investigation, on a bigger sample would be required to consolidate the obtained findings. It would furthermore be of interest to determine the effects of the profiles on the students’ academic performance, career choice, doctor-patient relationship, among other, also building an opportunity to tailor specific characteristics through curriculum modulation.