Treating Patients As People: What Do Hospital Patients Want Clinicians to Know About Them As a Person?

Abstract

Background: There is little understanding or focus on the patient's personal communicative perspective during their experience of clinical treatment. An exploratory study and a follow-up study were conducted at a large safety net hospital to determine whether and what patients wanted clinicians to know more about them as a person. Study Design: A convenience sample of 230 patients was selected from 9 different clinical units within the hospital for exploratory interviews to determine whether patients wanted their clinical team to know about them as a person. Based on these findings, additional personal preference data of patients were collected from a census sample of 387 patients selected from 2 intensive care unit units and 2 medical-surgical units. Findings: The majority of patients in the exploratory study reported they wanted to tell their doctors/ nurses some personal information about themselves, thought doctors/nurses could provide better care to them if they knew more about them as a person, and that communication between themselves and their doctors/nurses would improve if they knew more about them as a person. The follow-up study found that a majority of patients preferred that their clinicians call them by their first name and identified specific personal information they wanted to share with the clinical care team. The data also showed a meaningful number of patients who did not want to share this information with others. This split in patient preferences is an important reminder that being aware of personal preferences of patients does not necessarily mean an invitation to increase intimacy in all clinician-patient communications.

Evidence-Based Performance Indicators of Positive Inpatient Experiences

“…Fostering respectful and compassionate relationships is also key in providing relationship-centered care. For instance, obtaining information as simple as what the patient prefers to be called as well as important information about the patient can help enrich interactions between the patient and the provider (Zimmerman et al, 2020). Care providers can gain insight into a patient's response to illness by deepening their knowledge of the patient, and such information can support efforts in delivering quality care (Kelley et al, 2013).…”

Strategies for effective patient care: Integrating quality communication with the patient‐centered approach

“…Amid growing emphasis on the provision of holistic care, shifts in patient–provider roles, and mounting evidence of discord between patients' and providers' perceptions of communication quality, endorsement of the R‐IE‐SDM model has notably faded given its lack of means for accommodating these novel demands in modern care delivery. As evidence of these shifts in the patient–provider dynamic, patients often express a strong desire to share personal information with providers, implying that providers should be informed about their patients' subjective illness experience and preferences in order to optimize care delivery (Zimmerman, Min, Davis‐Collins, & DeBlieux, 2019). As a result, recent efforts to improve care delivery often focus on understanding illness as experienced by individual patients in their daily lives (e.g., Charlton, Dearing, Berry, & Johnson, 2008; Ha et al, 2010; Ong et al, 1995; Tongue et al, 2005).…”

“…As evidence of these shifts in the patient-provider dynamic, patients often express a strong desire to share personal information with providers, implying that providers should be informed about their patients' subjective illness experience and preferences in order to optimize care delivery (Zimmerman, Min, Davis-Collins, & DeBlieux, 2019). As a result, recent efforts to improve care delivery often focus on understanding illness as experienced by individual patients in their daily lives (e.g., Charlton, Dearing, Berry, & Johnson, 2008;Ha et al, 2010;Ong et al, 1995;Tongue et al, 2005).…”

Asking the right questions: towards a person-centered conception of shared decision-making regarding treatment of advanced chronic kidney disease in older patients

“…At the same time, studies observe that a substantial part of patients still doubts or even regrets their treatment decision afterwards, especially if the decision was more driven by the healthcare professional’s preference [ 29 – 31 ]. Many patients express the need for more time and particularly more interactions with their healthcare team to consider more thoroughly their situation, their options, and what matters to them, as well as to be more fully seen and heard [ 28 , 32 – 35 ].…”