Communicative Practices Clinicians Use to Correct Patient Misconceptions in Primary Care Visits

Area of Science:

• Medical Communication
• Clinical Interaction Analysis
• Patient Education

Background:

• Patient misconceptions can negatively impact health outcomes and treatment adherence.
• Effective clinician strategies for addressing patient misunderstandings are not fully understood.
• Primary care settings involve frequent patient-clinician interactions where misconceptions may arise.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate and characterize the methods clinicians employ to correct patient misconceptions during primary care visits.
• To operationalize and identify specific clinician correction practices within clinical interactions.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of 23 video-recorded primary care visits.
• Integration of microanalysis of clinical interaction and conversation analysis.
• Identification of 59 patient misconception-clinician correction episodes based on defined criteria (clinician refutation, patient certainty, factual inaccuracy).

Main Results:

• Patient misconceptions most frequently concerned medication issues.
• Seven distinct clinician correction practices were identified: three direct (surprise, disagreement, contradiction) and four indirect (correct proposition, explanation, authority, evidence).
• Direct and indirect correction practices were employed with nearly equal frequency.

Conclusions:

• Clinicians utilize a balanced repertoire of direct and indirect communication strategies to correct patient misconceptions.
• The findings provide insights into effective communication patterns for addressing patient misunderstandings in healthcare.
• Further research can explore the differential impact of these correction strategies on patient understanding and behavior.