Communication in Patient-Physician Relationship in Turkey: Opinions of Family Physician Residents

Nazife Alpman, Gülsen Ceyhun Peker

Keywords: Family Physician, Communication, Turkey

Background:

Creating a healthy society is directly related to creating healthy communication media in social life.Primary care health service centers are the first contact point for patients to encounter healthcare services.The effective patient-physician relationship that is established here significantly affects the effectiveness and quality of the service and improves preventive and curative health services.A healthy patient-physician communication increases satisfaction with health services, eases overcoming diseases, ensures cooperation with patient in treatment, decreases malpractice cases and burnout syndrome in physicians.It is accepted that 70% of the diagnoses are made as a result of a healthy patient-physician interview.However, in this multiple structure where reciprocal information exchange is intense there are personal variables such as work, education, family, social life, stress…And these may turn into communication confusion and problems.When the complaints of the patients about physicians are examined, it is seen that they mostly complain about physicians’ communication skills.On the other hand, according to the researches 63% and 90.6% of family physicians working in primary care health service centers had a negative communication experience with their patients.In the literature, there are studies carried out on patients and physicians working in primary care health service centers about patient-physician communication.However, the researches about the family physician residents, who are the family physician specialists of the future, are limited.

Research questions:

Are there the communication problems in patient-physician relationship?
How does education of communication effect this relationship?

Method:

We are collecting volunteer family physician residents’ viewpoints by online survey. Data is going to be analyzed by IBM SPSS 15.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA) program, an α level of .05 will be used for all statistical tests.

Results:

not yet

Conclusions:

Points for discussion:

Are there the communication problems in patient-physician relationship?

How does education of communication effect this relationship?

Which other variables do effect this relationship?

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