Hearing the Patient's Voice in Health Care: A Survey Analysis of Patients' Perceptions of Difficulties in Shared Clinical Decision-Making.

Abstract

To explore the factors which affect shared decision-making and develop strategies to get patients actively involved in clinical decision-making. The survey was conducted in one of the Third-grade hospitals in southwest part of China for a total of 565 patients involved. SPSS 17.0 was used to perform data extraction and analysis. The survey yielded to 600 questionnaires with a 94% response rate. There were 68% patients who had some knowledge of the disease. Most of the patients (92.94%) have a positive attitude to participate in clinical decision making and 95% patients hope to know the medical information of treatment. Account for 60.24% patients would like to obtain information from doctors. While, only 46.21% patients can achieve the goals. Meanwhile, There were 79.2 % patients who are satisfied with the current treatment plan. The patients’ biggest concerns were: treatment effect, cost and doctors’ skills. The biggest difficulties that patients worried about were: long-time waiting in out-patient departments (50.47%) and limited time to communicate with doctors (37.08%). As more and more patients would like to involve in shared decision-making, doctors need to provide patients with more choices and help them make a right decision in their treatment. A successful bidirectional way between and patients will obtain patients’ trust and cooperation.