Recipients’ perspective on breaking bad news: How you put it really makes a difference

Abstract

Objective: The goal of this study was to show that physician communication style of breaking bad news affects how the physician is perceived, how satisfied recipients of bad news are with the consultation, and how they feel after the consultation. Method: Female participants (students, N = 159) were asked to put themselves in the shoes of a patient receiving the bad news of a breast cancer diagnosis. Participants were randomly assigned to watch one of three prototypical physician communication styles of breaking bad news on videotape: patient-, disease-, or emotion-centered communication.Results: Results showed that these three prototypical communication styles were perceived very differently and they determined how satisfied participants were with the consultation and how they felt after the consultation. Participants exposed to the patient-centered communication perceived the physician as most emotional, least dominant, most appropriate when it comes to conveying information, most available and most expressive of hope. Also, they reported to be most satisfied with the visit and they showed the least increase in negative emotions. Conclusion: A patient-centered communication style has the most positive outcome for recipients of bad news on a cognitive, evaluative, and emotional level. Practice implications: Results of this study provide guidelines to physicians on how to convey bad news. #

Disentangling physician sex and physician communication style: Their effects on patient satisfaction in a virtual medical visit

“…In laboratory studies of interpersonal communication, researchers often have participants read vignettes or watch videotapes of a physician-patient interaction [35][36][37]. In these studies, participants are asked to put themselves in the shoes of the patient and imagine and indicate how they would judge the physician or how they would interact with the physician.…”

Perceived dominance in physicians: Are female physicians under scrutiny?

“…Participants watched the videos showing physician-patient interactions while imagining themselves to be the patient (analogue patients). The use of so-called analogue patients is common in the study of physician-patient interaction and analogue patients can be students or patients [28][29][30][31].…”

Five years of EACH (European Association for Communication in Healthcare)

“…Given the topics of EACH committee members' most recent publications, new areas of interest include, for instance, the role of the broader context in which a problem is presented [11], unconventional outcome measures such as skin conductance and cortisol [12] and new interaction analysis systems, such as sequence analysis and cue-responding [13][14][15][16][17][18]. There also appears to be an increasing interest in the role of the nurse-patient communication [19,20] and role delineation [21,22] as well as a renewed interest in decision-making [23], breaking bad news [24,25], training effects [26][27][28] and somatization [29,30]. In addition, since 2001, a number of new assessment and observation instruments have been developed [31,32] and existing ones have been (re)validated [33,34] or re-evaluated [35,36].…”