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Objective. To investigate patients' preference and the attitude towards physician attire in an internal medicine clinic in China. Methods. This study was conducted from 1 January 2021 to 30 June 2021 in a tertiary care hospital in China. We surveyed 126 patients in the hospital with 6 sets of pictures of commonly worn physician attires in the hospital setting with a two-part questionnaire. The first part listed respondent demographics to collect basic information. The second part of the questionnaire was administered to adult patients who received care in the internal medicine clinics (outpatients). Survey forms collected demographic data (age, gender, patient age, education, marital status, and employment status), asked questions regarding 6 specific attires (scrubs, scrubs and white coat, casual, casual and white coat, business suit, and formal and white coat), and behavioral items (professional, responsible, reliable, knowledgeable, succession rate, and medical safety), finally, to assess the preference of attire on overall perception. Results. Scrubs and white coat scored the highest through 6 domains about physicians' attire (professional, reliable, responsible, knowledgeable, medical safety, and succession rate, p < 0.05 for all comparisons). A casual suit without a white coat was the least preferred across the surveyed attributes. There was a significant preference gap between wearing a white coat and not wearing a white coat (p < 0.001). Physician attire to white coat was considered as more professional, reliable, responsible, knowledgeable, having greater medical safety, and a higher success rate than attires without white coat. Conclusion. Patients felt that the physician wearing a white coat was better than other attires. Scrubs and white coat was the most popular attire. Hospital or related authorities may promote the standardized wearing of white coats, leading in a greater patient-physician relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the literature review on medical education and university performance evaluations and from the perspective of individual advantage identification, an evaluation method of medical universities' performance in a hierarchical context was proposed. This study designs a method system, including individual learning benchmarking from the individual perspective, group learning benchmarking from the democratic perspective, and benchmarking of single and overall indicators. From the perspective of the most favorable to medical universities, this study applies the designed research methods to the performance evaluation of medical universities and takes 15 medical universities in China as samples to conduct an empirical research. The following conclusions were found. First, the method helps form various development modes of medical universities in the individual advantage characteristic context. Second, the method not only shows objectivity but also provides a basis for how medical universities find individual and integral benchmarking. Finally, the method demonstrates the democracy feature, which provides a basis for how relevant departments allocate resources and formulate policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]