Disliking some patients is part of clinical work. The honest acknowledgment of this is the first step toward managing it well. The clinician who pretends to like all patients equally is either lying to themselves or to others; the clinician who notices their dislike and addresses it produces better care than either pretender.
Notice without acting on it. The clinical skill is awareness without behavior change. You notice you don't like this patient. You notice you're dreading their appointment. You notice you've been short with them in the last visit. The noticing is half the work. The other half is not letting it affect the care.
Specific patterns of being short: running shorter visits with them than with comparable patients. Less effort in formulation. Less patience with their questions. Less follow-through. Less warmth. These are the behavioral manifestations of dislike, and they damage the patient's care. Catch them and reverse them.
What the dislike reflects is often informative. Sometimes it reflects the patient's actual impact on others — chronically complaining patients, manipulative patients, deeply unrewarding patients produce similar reactions in many clinicians. That's clinical information about the patient. Sometimes it reflects your own material — the patient who reminds you of a difficult family member, the patient whose pattern triggers your own unresolved issues. That's information about you, addressed in supervision or your own work.
Supervision is the tool for examining what's happening. "I really don't like this patient. I want to think about what that means." Supervision can help differentiate clinical pattern from personal reaction, and either way produces better care.
Do the work anyway. The clinical professionalism standard is delivering the same quality of care regardless of personal feelings about the patient. The patient deserves competent care regardless of whether you enjoy seeing them. The clinician who can do that consistently is doing the work; the clinician who needs to like patients to care for them well is fragile in a way that limits practice.
Repeated patient patterns you dislike may indicate burnout or specific countertransference areas. The clinician who finds themselves disliking many patients similarly may need their own support.