What Personality Characteristics Align with PHPM?

All careers require character compatibility to ensure success and longevity; medicine is no different. Even within medicine, subspecialties lend themselves to different personalities. So what are the ideal PHPM characteristics? The obvious one is a high emotional intelligence quotient. Equally important (yet less obvious), PHPM physicians need strong emotional management strategies and cognitive malleability.

Emotional management in PHPM is the ability to manage one’s own emotions and those around him/her/them. Emotional cognitive processing (the sublimation of emotions into tasks to offset the heavy emotional toll) and healthy boundaries are key characteristics for longevity within PHPM. Concomitantly, PHPM clinicians need to be comfortable with the strong emotions of other healthcare providers, patients, and families. This most commonly includes navigating sadness, anxiety, and anger. Conflict is frequent given these strong emotions so facileness with emotional regulation is key to conflict resolution, job competency, and longevity.

Cognitive malleability is also paramount. Most PHPM jobs will be a blend of acute care and chronic home- based care so physicians need to be knowledgeable and comfortable in both settings. Concomitantly, PHPM physicians must have skill and comfort in a myriad of sub-specialty care domains. While content expertise of a singular subspecialty is never needed, the ability to understand, wield, and deliver the information to parents and converse with consulting physicians is critical. HPM clinicians also need to have the cognitive flexibility to tolerate clinical ambiguity and guide clinician, patient and family decision making despite the uncertainty. Finally, successful HPM physicians possess multiple interactive styles to align with the characteristics of the consulting subspecialty and the clinical scenario at hand. Complex care patients and clinicians facing a life-threatening crisis approach it differently than an intensivist and family facing a sudden life-threatening crisis in previously healthy child. HPM clinicians must have the emotional toolbox, communication skills, and knowledge base to facilitate both scenarios and the myriad of others that reside in the daily practice of HPM.