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

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.

Health literacy and abdominal aortic aneurysms.

OBJECTIVE: Little is known about the public's knowledge of abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA). Although preventive screening is available, millions of Americans remain unaware of their risk. Improved health literacy has been associated with increased screening and improvement in health outcomes. This study assessed the level of AAA literacy among respondents who participated in a free AAA screening event. METHODS: Thirteen key words used by vascular surgeons to describe the risk, diagnosis, and treatment options for AAA were extracted from the screening tool used by the nation's largest provider of free AAA diagnostic services, AAAneurysm Outreach. The National Institutes of Health recommends readability of patient education materials to be at the sixth-grade level, but a readability analysis of these words placed them at a grade level of 14.6. A self-administrated questionnaire was developed that allowed respondents to compare each of the extracted words with a definitionally correct or incorrect word that reflected a sixth-grade readability score. These scores were then compared with the available demographics. RESULTS: There were 570 completed questionnaires. Of the participants, 57.6% were female, 61.4% were 60 and above, and 32.6% were veterans. The average number of correct answers was 9.31 out of 13 (72% correct). Only 4.7% answered all questions correctly, with 29.1% missing five or more answers. The most frequently missed words were asymptomatic, screening, and cholesterol (56.5%, 44%, and 41.4% incorrect, respectively). The most frequently known terms were abdominal, diagnosis, and genetic (96%, 95.3%, and 91.9% correct, respectively). The remaining words fell between these extremes. Those aged 60 and above scored significantly lower than younger respondents (P < .0001). A post hoc power analysis indicated that the power to detect the obtained effects of age at the .05 level was greater than 0.95. Gender and veteran status did not produce any significant differences. CONCLUSIONS: These data suggest an important communication gap between the words used by clinicians to describe the risks, diagnostic results, and treatment options of AAA and the targeted at-risk population, especially those 60 years and older.