Family Practice Vol. 20, No. 4, 428-433
© Oxford University Press 2003
International Health Care Research |
Patient expectations at a multicultural out-patient clinic in Switzerland
Policlinique médicale universitaire, rue du Bugnon 44, 1011 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Correspondence to Noelle Junod Perron; E-mail: noelle.junod{at}hcuge.ch
Junod Perron N, Secretan F, Vannotti M, Pecoud A and Favrat B. Patient expectations at a multicultural out-patient clinic in Switzerland. Family Practice 2003; 20: 428–433.
Received 30 September 2002; Revised 25 February 2003; Accepted 28 March 2003.
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Abstract |
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Background. Recognizing patient expectation is considered as an important objective for primary care physicians. A number of studies suggest that failure to identify patient expectations can lead to patient dissatisfaction with care, lack of compliance and inappropriate use of medical resources. It has been suggested that identifying patient expectations in multicultural contexts can be especially challenging.
Objectives. The aim of the study was to compare health care expectations of Swiss and immigrant patients attending the out-patient clinic of a Swiss university hospital and to assess physicians’ ability to identify their patients’ expectations.
Methods. Over a 3-month period, all patients attending the out-patient clinic at a Swiss university hospital were requested to complete pre-consultation surveys. Their physicians were requested to complete post-consultation surveys. Outcome measures were patients’ self-rated health, resort to prior home treatment, patients’ expectations of the consultation, physicians’ perception of their patients’ expectations and agreement between patients and physicians.
Results. We analysed 343 questionnaires completed by patients prior to their consultation (> 50% immigrants) and 333 questionnaires completed by their physicians after the consultation. Most expectations were shared by all patients. Physicians had inaccurate perceptions of their patients’ expectations, regardless of patients’ origin.
Conclusions. Our study found no evidence that immigrant patients’ expectations differed from those of Swiss patients, nor that physicians had more difficulty identifying expectations of immigrant patients. However, physicians in our study were generally poor at identifying patients’ expectations, and therefore inter-group differences may be difficult to detect. Our results point to the need to strengthen physicians’ general communication skills which should then serve as a foundation for more specific, cross-cultural communication training.
Keywords. Immigrants, patients’ expectations, physicians’ perception.
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Introduction |
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Recognizing patient expectations is a major element of an effective doctor–patient relationship in ambulatory care.1 A number of studies suggest that failure to identify patient expectations can lead to dissatisfaction, lack of compliance and inappropriate use of medical resources.2–4 It has been suggested that identifying patient expectations in multicultural contexts can be especially challenging.5,6 Although physicians are increasingly in contact with patients from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, little is known of how patient diversity affects physicians’ ability to identify patients’ expectations.
In our university out-patient clinic, primary care is provided to a very heterogeneous population of patients, including Swiss nationals and immigrants mainly from southern Europe, the formerYugoslavia and Africa. Unlike other countries, our physicians receive little training in cultural competence and are ill-prepared to care for such diverse patient populations.7–9 A number of studies have suggested that physicians consider immigrant patients to be more demanding, difficult to understand and to have greater expectations than native-born patients.10–12 It is often assumed that communication may improve when patients and physicians share some common background.13 Anecdotal evidence from our clinic suggested similar experiences and attitudes among physicians.
The aim of the study was to identify and compare expectations of Swiss and immigrant patients attending the out-patient clinic of a Swiss university hospital and to assess physicians’ ability to identify their patient expectations. We hypothesized that physicians would be less accurate in identifying the expectations of immigrant patients, due to language and cultural barriers. We were mostly interested in physicians’ assessment of their immigrant patients’ expectations, since difficulties were often reported by our physicians in such a field.
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Methods |
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The study was carried out at the out-patient clinic of the Internal Medicine Department of the University Hospital of Lausanne, Switzerland, which provides medical care with or without appointment on a first-come first-served basis. Pre-consultation patient surveys and matched post-consultation physician surveys were administered over a 3-month period. Eligible subjects were all French-, Serbo-croat- or Albanian-speaking adult patients over 18 years old coming to the clinic without an appointment. They were asked to answer a self-administered questionnaire available in French, Serbo-Croat and Albanian in the waiting room before the medical visit. The Albanian and Serbo-Croat versions were translated and back-translated by two independent translators working in the clinic. Ninety-six percent of patients who were approached (343 out of 358) agreed to participate in the study. We defined patient expectations as desires, wishes or entitlements.14 Expectations about the coming consultation (listening, reassuring, physical examination, diagnosis, investigation, referral to a specialist, counselling, prognosis, medication and sick leave) were adapted from existing scales and scored on a 5-point scale (not important to very important).15,16 Immigrants were defined as patients reporting a country of origin other than Switzerland. We also included questions about health status, presenting symptoms, prior home treatment and socio-demographic data. We conducted a pilot study among 15 patients to make sure that questions were understandable and relevant. Fifteen physicians, all in general internal medicine post-graduate training, between 28 and 35 years of age and of Swiss origin, completed questionnaires about perceptions of their patients’ expectations at the end of the medical consultation. The ethical committee of the University Hospital of Lausanne approved the study protocol.
Differences in Swiss versus immigrant patients’ socio-demographic data, health status and prior use of home treatment were tested by the chi-square test; P-values <5% were considered to be statistically significant. To analyse socio-demographic and health data, we further classified immigrant patients into four groups based on common geographical entities and their representation rate in the study. In order to test differences in Swiss versus immigrant patients’ expectations, we carried out a stepwise logistic regression using age, sex, marital status, education, subjective health assessment and presenting symptom as independent variables. Findings among immigrant patients were then adjusted to length of stay in Switzerland and French proficiency. Agreement between patients’ expectations and their perception by physicians was evaluated using the kappa coefficient which measures the degree of agreement between two variables that occurs beyond that expected by chance. The 5-point scale scoring of expectations was reduced into two categories (i) important to very important; and (ii) not, a little or moderately important. We used the SPSS software 10.0 for the analysis.
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Results |
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Three hundred and forty-three patient questionnaires and 333 physician questionnaires were analysed. There were 48.7% (n = 167) Swiss and 51.3% (n = 176) non-Swiss patients. Patients came mainly from western Europe (n = 50), the former Yugoslavia (n = 37) and Africa (n = 62). Among western Europeans, 75% were from Italy, Spain or Portugal. African patients mainly originated from Congo, Angola, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. Patients from the former Yugoslavia came mostly from Kosovo and Bosnia. Mean age was 39 ± 17 years for Swiss patients and 33 ± 11 years for immigrant patients. Socio-demographic data are shown in Table 1
: patients from the former Yugoslavia were more often married, male and asylum seekers, and Africans had a higher level of education. There were no statistical differences in the type, occurrence and duration of symptoms, regularity of medical follow-up, previous home treatment and subjective degree of urgency to seek care among the five groups of patients (Table 2). However, patients from the former Yugoslavia and from Europe tended to have a more negative health self-assessment.
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Patients’ expectations and physicians’ perceptions are shown in Table 3
. As indicated, most patients hoped for reassurance, physical examination, diagnosis, counselling, information about prognosis and medication. More technical expectations such as desire for investigations and referral to a specialist were present, but to a lesser extent. The multivariate analysis showed that more immigrant patients asked for reassurance [odds ratio (OR) 3.3, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.9–5.6] and referral to a specialist (OR 1.8, 95% CI 1.2–2.9). However, when adjusted for French proficiency and length of stay in Switzerland, such differences faded out.
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Finally, we found poor agreement between patients’ expectations and their physician’s perception, regardless of patients’ origin (highest kappa = 0.36). Physicians both failed to identify patients’ expectations (underestimation) and erroneously identified expectations where they were absent (overestimation). Underestimation and overestimation of patients’ expectations by physicians are shown in Table 4
. The main areas where physicians systematically underestimated both Swiss and immigrant patients’ expectations were counselling, investigations and referrals to a specialist. They also underestimated immigrant patients’ expectations of information for prognosis. Overestimation of patients’ expectations occurred principally with regards to reassurance, prognosis and medication among immigrant patients.
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Discussion |
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Over the last several decades, the importance of eliciting patients’ perspectives on illness and health care expectations has been given increasing attention by both researchers and clinicians.3,14,16–19 In addition, numerous studies have indicated that race, ethnicity, culture and origin frequently affect the quality of the patient– physician relationship, health care outcomes and patient satisfaction.20–23 However, we know little about the impact of patient origin on physicians’ ability to identify patients’ expectations.
Our study produces three interesting results. First, most patients, whatever their origin, share similar expectations of health care. These include diagnosis, listening, physical examination and counselling. Similar rates are reported in other studies, with special value attributed to diagnostic and prognostic information.2,3,16 Two specific expectations which were expressed more by immigrant patients, reassurance and referral to a specialist, were no longer present when such findings were adjusted for length of stay and French proficiency, two important factors of integration. Although physicians may often feel that immigrant patients have unrealistic health care expectations, we did not observe this in our study. It is of course possible that the structured nature of the design did not allow for patients to disclose their health care expectations fully.
Secondly, in our study, immigrant patients do not consult more quickly than Swiss patients. They have a regular physician and self-treat before attending the doctor as often as Swiss patients. These findings are similar to those of other studies that observed that ethnic, minority groups and immigrant patients do not systematically make heavier demands on physicians or health systems, contrary to our physicians’ assumptions.11,24,25
Thirdly, the physicians in our study have a poor awareness of their patients’ expectations, regardless of patients’ origin. Lack of agreement between patients’ expectations and physicians’ perceptions of patients’ expectations has been observed in a number of settings,16,26 but not, to our knowledge, in a multicultural out-patient setting such as ours. Physicians’ underestimation of patients’ desire for counselling, prognosis, medication, investigations and referral to a specialist is of concern. Although we did not collect information on patients’ satisfaction with their consultations, several studies have shown that patient’s satisfaction was negatively correlated with unmet expectations.3,4,27,28 Since unrecognized and/ or unfulfilled expectations have been shown to influence other health outcomes negatively, physicians should be better trained to elicit and acknowledge their patients’ expectations.14 Exploring the patients’ ideas, feelings about illness and expectations towards the physician is a major component of patient-centred care and should help in establishing effective communication with the patient and serve as a base for negotiation, discussion and counselling.29 However, determinants of satisfaction are multidimensional and not only related to the communication inside the consultation.30,31 The fact that physicians tended to overestimate their patients’ desire for medication has already been reported.16,32,33 Since physicians’ opinion about patients’ expectations appears to be the strongest determinant for prescribing, such expectations should be explored more carefully in order to avoid unnecessary medication and cost.32,33
We expected physicians to perform better with Swiss patients than with immigrant patients because common language, race, ethnicity or culture appear to improve understanding and satisfaction between patients and physicians.34–36 However, in our study, this was not the case. There are several possible explanations for these findings. A structured non-open-ended questionnaire may not be the best way to assess differences in expectations and perception of expectations in such a heterogeneous population. Kravitz et al.37 reported in a US study that non-white patients reported more expectations by questionnaire and fewer by interview. In a walk-in clinic setting, physicians and patients generally are not well acquainted, and this may contribute to difficulties in identifying patients’ expectations, regardless of their social or cultural characteristics.
Our study has limitations. First, we only looked at differences in expectations between Swiss and non-Swiss patients because we did not expect to obtain enough questionnaires to be able to define any specific social, cultural, racial or ethnic subgroups. Classifying such a heterogeneous population of patients into subgroups often is misleading because it may mask important variations relevant to expectations such as language, levels of acculturation, health beliefs, previous experience of illness and health care, etc.38–40 Secondly, as already mentioned, asking patients about their expectations as well as submitting a structured questionnaire with closed-ended questions might have affected the patients’ spontaneous response by inducing unified and/or increased expectations. Differences between Swiss and immigrant patients’ expectations may have been undetected. Thirdly, we did not assess patients’ satisfaction with the consultation nor health outcomes, and therefore are unable to evaluate the impact of unfulfilled expectations on such issues among both groups of patients.
We found that physicians at our clinic were poor in identifying their patients’ expectations. As a number of anthropologists have observed, even when patients and physicians share some common socio-cultural background, important differences in expectations, concerns, meanings and values remain.40 Our results point to the need to strengthen physicians’ general communication skills, in addition to more specific, cross-cultural communication training.
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Acknowledgments |
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The authors thank Bernard Burnand and Patricia Hudelson for their comments on an earlier version of this article.
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References |
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