Use of the Personality Assessment Inventory in Fitness-for-Duty Evaluations of Physicians

ABSTRACT

This study provides normative data regarding the use of the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) in physician fitness-for-duty evaluations. Information was derived from a sample of 371 physicians who took the PAI as part of a comprehensive fitness-for-duty evaluation. A multidisciplinary evaluation team, not blinded to psychological testing results, recommended whether or not each physician was fit to practice, allowing for the differentiation of results by this finding. The majority of PAI protocols were valid and interpretively useful. Descriptive statistics are presented for validity, clinical, treatment, interpersonal, and subscale scores. Mean differences for those found fit versus unfit to practice are also presented. Significant elevations for clinical scales are rare in physicians referred for fitness-for-duty evaluations. Although mean differences were small between the fit and unfit groups, there were significant mean differences found. Guidance is offered for interpreting the PAI in this population.

Funding

This research was supported by Clinical and Translational Science Awards award No.UL1TR000445 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent official views of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences or the National Institutes of Health.

Notes

¹ In research on the PAI in law enforcement evaluations, Roberts et al. (2004) included in their study protocols with high PIM scores. In addition, their software generates psychograms that show both validity scores based on the original PAI norms and based on their law enforcement sample. We believe it is important to show the full range of these validity scales in our sample, to guide interpretation of scores as compared to the full sample.