How to optimally manage unhappy, anxious, and difficult patients

Patient satisfaction has been and is of growing importance in healthcare. Recent healthcare initiatives aim to provide physicians with performance feedback reports based partially on patient completed surveys; thus, patient satisfaction will be an even more important determinant of high quality care. In the field of dermatology, patient satisfaction is particularly relevant and at times difficult to achieve, since many patients are plagued with chronic skin diseases often requiring intensive topical regimens or undesirable systemic immunosuppressants. The discussion of patient satisfaction is usually restricted to encounters with the general clinic population leaving encounters with difficult patients largely underreported; therefore, we provide examples of more common difficult patient encounters a dermatologist may face with specific recommendations on how to best optimize patient satisfaction.