Abstract
BackgroundThe patient’s anxiety before seeing a doctor may influence her/his hospital choice behavior through various ways. In order to explore why high level hospitals were overused by patients and why low level hospitals were not fully used by patients in China, this study was set up to test whether and to what extent the patient’s anxiety before seeing a doctor influenced her/his hospital choice behavior in China.MethodsThis study commissioned a large-scale 2009–2010 national resident household survey (N=4,853) in China, and in this survey the Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) was employed to help patients assess their anxiety before seeing a doctor. Specified ordered probit models were established to analyze the survey dataset.ResultsWhen the patient had high level of anxiety before seeing a doctor, her/his level of anxiety could not only predict that she/he was more likely to choose the high level hospital, but also accurately predict which level of hospital she/he would choose; when the patient had low level of anxiety before seeing a doctor, her/his level of anxiety could only predict that she/he was more likely to choose the low level hospital, but it couldn’t clearly predict which level of hospital she/he would choose.ConclusionThe patient with high level of anxiety had the strong consistent bias when she/he chose a hospital (she/he always preferred the high level hospital), while the patient with low level of anxiety didn’t have such consistent bias.
Highlights
The patient’s anxiety before seeing a doctor may influence her/his hospital choice behavior through various ways
The decision-making that was an essential aspect of the cognitive functioning relied on the correct labeling, processing and control of emotional stimulus, since the patient’s anxiety exerted its influence on the cognitive functioning by altering the processing of environmental information in favor of the negative emotional stimulus, this situation further resulted in the attention, memory and interpretation biases towards such stimulus, the patient’s anxiety that could be seen as the adaptive emotion adequately directed her/his response towards the possible threatening stimulus/ situation to influence her/his decision-making behavior [1,2,3,4,5,6]
In order to explore why high level hospitals were overused by patients and why low level hospitals were not fully used by patients in China, this study was set up to test whether and to what extent the patient’s anxiety before seeing a doctor influenced her/his hospital choice behavior in China
Summary
The patient’s anxiety before seeing a doctor may influence her/his hospital choice behavior through various ways. The patient’s emotion was found to significantly influence her/his tendency to take risk and uncertainty, and found to significantly influence the impact of the framing of the problem on her/his risky and uncertain choice in a systematic and predictable way: the patient’s anxiety that was her/his negative emotion tended to make her/him more pessimistic about the future outcome of her/his hospital choice behavior, and this situation could lead to her/his risk aversion, this phenomenon was proved true even when the patient’s anxiety resulted from the factors that were wholly unrelated to the issue whose risk she/he assessed [14,15,16,17]; the precise role of the patient’s anxiety depended on the framing of the problem, if the problem involved risky and uncertain choices, the patient with high level of anxiety tended to act risk-averse when the problem was framed in terms of gains, while she/he tended to act riskseeking when the same problem was instead framed in terms of losses [17], since the patient’s hospital choice problem was framed in terms of health gains and economic losses, and the health gains were usually considered more important than the economic losses by the patient with high level of anxiety, she/he usually tended to act risk-averse when she/he made her/his hospital choice.
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