Doctors' responses to patients' concerns: testing the use of sequential analysis

Area of Science:

• Medical Communication
• Health Services Research
• Patient-Provider Interaction

Background:

• Understanding doctor-patient communication is crucial for effective healthcare delivery.
• Patient concerns and worries are key moments in medical consultations that require appropriate provider responses.
• Previous research highlights the importance of both empathic and facilitative communication behaviors.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore interaction sequences in medical consultations, focusing on doctor responses to patient concerns.
• To analyze the frequency and timing of empathic versus facilitative behaviors by doctors.
• To assess the adequacy of doctor responses to patient worries and concerns.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of nine randomly selected general practitioner (GP) consultations from a larger sample (1600).
• Utilized the Roter Interaction Analysis System (RIAS) for consultation rating.
• Investigated doctor responses within five utterances following a patient's expression of concern.

Main Results:

• Doctors predominantly employed facilitative responses over empathic responses to patient concerns.
• Empathic responses, when present, typically occurred immediately after the patient's concern (within one utterance).
• This suggests a pattern in how doctors address patient worries sequentially.

Conclusions:

• Sequential analysis is a suitable method for examining healthcare provider communication styles.
• Findings suggest a tendency for more facilitative than empathic immediate responses to patient concerns.
• Further methodological exploration of sequential analysis in healthcare communication is recommended.