Health care professionals’ perceptions of seriously ill women

Abstract

Physicians, psychologists, and nurses read one of four vignettes describing a woman who had received one of four diagnoses--breast cancer, lung cancer, heart attack, or severe burn--and indicated on the Profile of Mood States (McNair, Lorr, & Droppleman, 1971) how they perceived the woman had been feeling during the past week. They then answered 10 questions about the woman's recovery and about their own anticipated behaviors while interacting with her. A number of differences emerged between professional groups in terms of their expectations for patients regardless of diagnosis. In addition, respondents held different emotional expectations for the patient, based solely on her diagnosis. These results support the need for training health care professionals to recognize psychological distress in, and appropriately refer, seriously ill women.

Perceptions of caring behaviors and patient anxiety and depression in cancer patient‐staff dyads

“…Both patients and staff gave high priority to 'Comforts' and 'Anticipates'; patients stressed the importance of 'Explains and facilitates' whereas staff first of all stressed 'Accessible'. In contrast to previous studies (von Essen & Sjoden 1991a,b, 1993. and accepted for publication, Larson 1984, 1986, Mayer 1987, the results d o not indicate that staff overestimated the importance of the subscale 'Comforts' in comparison with patients.…”

“…The CARE-Q (Larson 1981) was used to assess patient and staff perceptions of the importance of caring behaviors. The CARE-Q consists of 50 behaviors which the subject is instructed to rank in seven categories from most important to least important (von Essen & Sjoden 1991a,b, 1993 in making a patient feel cared for. The CARE-Q behaviors are ordered in six subscales 'Accessible' (6 items); 'Explains and facilitates' (6); 'Comforts' (9); 'Trusting relationship' ( 16); 'Anticipates' ( 5 ) and 'Monitors and follows through' (8).…”

“…In several studies, comparing in-patient and nursing staff perceptions of the importance of caring behaviors (von Essen & Sjodh 1991a,b, 1993, accepted for publication, Larson 1984, 1986, and Mayer 1987, patients have been asked to answer for themselves while staff has been asked to answer for a 'hypothetical' average patient. The results have demonstrated that somatic patients mainly stress the importance of the task-oriented dimension of caring whereas psychiatric patients and staff in both types of care stress the emotional aspect.…”

The Hyperemesis Beliefs Scale (HBS): a new instrument for assessing beliefs about severe nausea and vomiting in pregnancy

“…Future research investigating patients' and physicians' illness perceptions using the HBS with matched patientphysician pairs may prove beneficial [52]. Moreover, research investigating the personal reactions of physicians and other health care providers has been largely ignored in the literature [53]. An examination of attitudes about HG patients by their health care providers using the physician portion of the HBS would contribute to identifying and understanding current beliefs that influence health care practice.…”

Perceptions of Perinatal Loss: Miscarriage versus Stillbirth

“…The developer of the questionnaire, Hailey (1989) and her research team have used this measure repeatedly to work at achieving a better understanding of others' perceptions of medical patients (e.g. Hailey, 1989;Hardin & Hailey, 1993).…”