Physician-Elder Interaction in Community Family Practice

Abstract

Objective: To determine whether outpatient visits by elders seeing community family physicians differ in length or content from visits by younger patients; socioemotional preferences predict visit content; and satisfaction correlates with visit content differentially across age.Methods: In a multimethod cross-sectional study of 84 community family practices in northeastern Ohio, 3453 adult patient visits with 138 community family physicians were observed; 2362 of these patients completed self-report questionnaires. Three age groups were compared: 18 to 64, 65 to 74, and over 74 years. Length and content of the physician-patient encounter was determined using the Davis Observation Code (DOC); satisfaction was assessed using the MOS 9-item Visit Rating Scale. Medical breakthroughs during the 1900s have reduced early life mortality drastically and helped to swell the ranks of older people in this nation. 1Concerns about access to and quality of primary care for elders are growing as the numbers of people over 65 expands at an unprecedented rate.2,3

Factors related to consultation time: Experience in Slovenia

“…Longer consultation time correlated with the patient's gender (women tend to have longer consultations) and higher age of the patients [7,9,17,21]. However, only a small proportion of variability can be explained by the patient's age [7], which means that other factors, such as the number of health problems [9,20], the characteristics of the health problems, and the ''physician's speed'' are more important [7] predictors of consultation time.…”

Teleaudiologia: comunicação profissional-paciente na programação e adaptação de aparelhos de amplificação sonora individuais via teleconsulta

“…This kind of counseling occurs in a very small proportion in health consultations as professionals worry more about getting information on psychosocial and biomedical content both in face to face consultations and in teleconsultations (10,26) .…”

“…The performance of physical exams, tests and other "technical" procedures are common in face to face consultations with different health professinals (13,26) . In this research, the nature of the consultation can have contributed to the existence of a large percentage of behaviors of the "Technical" group.…”

Associations Between Older Adults' Spoken Interactive Health Literacy and Selected Health Care and Health Communication Outcomes

“…In addition, older adults often experience difficulty processing written health materials, and they typically score low on reading-based measures of health literacy (Echt, Schuchard, & Schroeder, 2002). Conversely, elderly patients often evince great reluctance to ask questions in medical encounters (Callahan et al, 2004), and, in that sense, even interactive health literacy levels could prove to be depressed among the elderly (Amalraj et al, 2009). Commonly investigated outcomes for which interactive health literacy scores may prove predictive include message comprehension, health status, satisfaction with health care, severity of barriers to health information, and chronic disease management.…”