Abstract
For centuries, doctors have been primarily concerned with the diseases that people suffer from. The interest in thorough knowledge of diseases has brought many positive but concurrently weakened the interest of health workers in the individual peculiarities of the ill person.
Experts started to become aware of this risk. This resulted in strengthening the trend that in clinical decision-making it is crucial to systematically identify and take into account the peculiarities of people who have the disease.
An overview study that approaches the new trend is structuredinto six parts. The first part describes the current understanding of the concept of knowing the patient and points out that there is a difference between knowledge of the patient (eg. knowledge of the results of the examination) and the knowledge of the patient himself as an individual.
The second part reminds that only when a healthcare practitioner understands the uniqueness of the patient he/she can choose an adequate individualized approach. The third part of the study presents the results of the analysis of 16 articles, which present some specific components of the general notion of "knowing the patient".
The author of the study grouped these components into 11 groups, creating 10 groups of psychological characteristics of the patient's personality and 1 group of health characteristics. The fourth part of the study describes procedures that may be used in medical practice to assessment peculiarities of the patient.
The fifth part summarizes the serious consequences of the fact that some healthcare professionals do not know the peculiarities of their patients. The last, sixth part, answers the question: How to develop the knowing of the patients' peculiarities?