[Influence of patient's social and demographic characteristics on patient's expectations for medical consultation]

Abstract

Most of the patients, coming to see their primary care physician, have explicit expectations and priorities for the medical consultation. Recognition of these expectations is an important step in organizing patient-oriented health care services. Patient expectations depend on a number of factors: health problem and its severity, as well as social and demographic characteristics of patient and physician. Objective of this survey was to evaluate influence of patient's socio-demographic characteristics and some health status indicators on expectations for primary care consultation.

Material and methods: During the study 403 patients and 162 physicians were surveyed. Pre-visit expectations of patients coming to see their primary care physician for health problem were investigated using self-addressed original questionnaire.

Results: Factor analysis revealed three main factors: biomedical expectations, emotional support expectations and expectations for partnership. Analysis of influence of socio-demographic characteristics on patient expectations showed that statistically significant differences in different age groups were found only for emotional support factor. Patients' desire for emotional support from doctor increased with age. Relationship was observed between expectations for emotional support and health status as perceived by patient. Patients evaluating their health problem as not serious had mean score of expectations for emotional support 3.4, patients with moderate health problem--3.5, patients with serious health problem--4.0 out of 5.

Conclusions: Patient's need for emotional support from physician depends on his age, marital status, frequency of his visits to physician during the year, self-perception of the health status and course of disease. Analysis of relationship between patient's expectations and his sex, education, physician's sex or type of practice did not show statistically significant differences between groups. No influence of analyzed social and demographic characteristics or perceived health status on biomedical expectations (laboratory tests, specialist consultations, and hospital treatment) was found during our study.