Creating information messages for reducing patient distress during health care procedures

Health care providers want strategies which they can use to assist patients in decreasing their distress during threatening health care procedures. Concrete objective information has been shown in laboratory and clinical studies to be effective in reducing negative emotional responses. Concrete objective information is a message, given before a health care event, which describes the experience from the patients' point of view in unambiguous, concrete, and objective terms. According to self-regulation theory, this type of information facilitates coping by decreasing the difference between expectations and actual experience and by increasing patients' understanding of their experience. However, little emphasis has been placed in the literature on the process of creating the message. This paper will describe a four-stage process that permits systematic development of comprehensive and accurate concrete objective information messages to prepare patients for health care procedures.