Patient participation in decision-making about cardiovascular preventive drugs - resistance as agency

From unwelcome to supportive. Patients' conceptions of being prescribed a glucose-lowering drug at type 2 diabetes diagnosis - a phenomenographic study

PURPOSE

Guidelines recommend starting glucose-lowering drug upon type 2 diabetes mellitus diagnosis together with lifestyle changes. Lifestyle changes are as essential as the drug, earlier recommendations allowed some months of lifestyle changes while being drug-free. Prescription on diagnosis may interfere with patients' understanding and motivation for lifestyle changes if they cannot evaluate the effect on blood glucose.

METHODS

A phenomenographic approach and interviews were conducted with patients who started a glucose-lowering drug at diagnosis.

RESULTS

Three qualitatively different conceptions of being prescribed glucose-lowering drugs in connection to type 2 diabetes mellitus diagnosis were found: "Drugs as something unwelcome," "Drugs as a support," and "Drugs as a means to reach the goal". These conceptions range broadly from drugs as unwelcome to drugs as a support for lifestyle changes and an opportunity to influence the course of the lifelong disease to reach a goal.

CONCLUSIONS

This study has identified various perspectives of patients' understanding of the role of lifestyle changes in managing their disease. The patients undergo a process, and the perspectives vary, providing a more extensive and nuanced understanding. It is, therefore, impossible to apply a routine protocol and a person-centred approach is required when prescribing a glucose-lowering drug.

Conceptualizing negotiation in the clinical encounter - A scoping review using principles from critical interpretive synthesis

OBJECTIVE

Negotiation as an analytical concept in research about clinical encounters is vague. We aim to provide a conceptual synthesis of key characteristics of the process of negotiation in clinical encounters based on a scoping review.

METHODS

We conducted a scoping review of relevant literature in Embase, Psych Info, Global Health and SCOPUS. We included 25 studies from 1737 citations reviewed.

RESULTS

We found that the process of negotiation is socially situated depending on the individual patient and professional, a dynamic element of the interaction that may occur both tacitly and explicitly at all stages of the encounter and is not necessarily tied to a specific health problem. Hence, negotiation is complex and influenced by both social, biomedical, and temporal contexts.

CONCLUSIONS

We found that negotiation between patient and health professional occurs at all stages of the clinical encounter. Negotiation is influenced by social, temporal, and biomedical contexts that encompass the social meeting between patient and health professional. We suggest that health professionals strive to be attentive to patients' tacit negotiation practices. This will strengthen the recognition of the patients' actual wishes for their course of treatment which can thus guide the health professionals' recommendations and treatment.

At the Heart of Resilience: Empowering Women's Agency in Navigating Cardiovascular Disease

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death among women globally, emphasizing the need for a healthcare approach that empowers women through agency. This review focuses on the critical role of women's agency in navigating CVD, integrating insights from various fields, including medicine, education, psychology, and sociology. The review highlights the shift toward patient-centred care, a framework in which women are recognized as key decision-makers, a crucial change given the historical underemphasis on women's health issues in medical practice. The diagnosis of CVD in women often involves emotional and psychological challenges. Unexpected diagnoses significantly disrupt perceived well-being, and prolonged diagnostic processes lead to professional skepticism and neglect of symptoms, resulting in delayed or inaccurate diagnoses and strained healthcare relationships. Effective management of CVD necessitates continuous self-management and a holistic approach to care, particularly for those with trauma who are at increased risk of cardiac incidents. Empowerment for women with CVD involves promoting self-confidence, autonomy, and active patient participation in healthcare. Implementing comprehensive care models is crucial for improving chronic CVD management, highlighting the need for healthcare systems that prioritize patient agency and empowerment. From the perspective of a woman with lived experience, this article examines the impact of CVD on women's agency throughout the diagnostic journey. By highlighting women's agency rather than particular behavioural changes, this review offers a comprehensive analysis that can shape policy, stimulate new research, and foster a more equitable, efficient, and empathetic healthcare system for women with CVD.

Formulation and Clients' Agency in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

The experience of loss of agency is one of the reasons for clients to go for psychotherapy. Enhancing clients’ agency has been considered a fundamental factor for successful treatment in psychiatry and psychotherapy, yet few studies have investigated the interactional realization of how therapists do this in authentic psychotherapeutic encounters. Drawing on audio-recorded talk-in-interaction between clients and psychotherapists in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) encounters at a mental health center in China, this paper uses the method of conversation analysis to demonstrate how therapists ascribe agency positions to clients by issuing formulations of what the clients have just said. Two types of formulation were identified: affirmative formulations and challenging formulations. In the first type, the therapists highlight the positive aspect of the clients’ description of their experiences and ascribe an agentic position to the clients. In the second, the therapists challenge the clients’ implausible views and their non-agentic positioning of themselves. This study shows that the therapists’ formulation could be employed to manage the epistemic difficulties associated with claiming knowledge about the clients’ inner states and assessing their feelings. In this sense, the formulation is a robust interactional device in negotiating epistemic problems in addressing the clients’ experiences and promoting their agency in therapy. However, it is noteworthy that in the challenging formulation, therapists claim privileged access to the clients’ knowledge domain and challenge their prior epistemic status, which might run the risk of engendering clients’ resistance.

Dealing with being prescribed cardiovascular preventive medication: a narrative analysis of qualitative interviews with patients with recent acute coronary heart disease in Sweden

OBJECTIVE

To explore how patients with experience of acute coronary heart disease make sense of, and deal with, the fact of being prescribed cardiovascular preventive medication.

DESIGN

Qualitative interview study.

SETTING

Swedish primary care.

PARTICIPANTS

Twenty-one participants with experience of being prescribed cardiovascular preventive medication, recruited from a randomised controlled study of problem-based learning for self-care for coronary heart disease.

METHODS

The participants were interviewed individually 6-12 months after their hospitalisation for acute coronary disease. A narrative analysis was conducted of their accounts of being prescribed cardiovascular preventive medication.

RESULTS

Four themes shape the patients' experiences: 'A matter of living' concerns an awareness of the will to live linked to being prescribed cardiovascular preventive medication regarded in the light of the recent hospitalisation. In 'Reconciliation of conflicting self-images', patients dealt with being prescribed preventive medication through work to restore an identity of someone responsible in spite of viewing the taking of medication as questionable. The status of feeling healthy, while being someone in need of medication, also constituted conflicting self-images. Following this, taking medication was framed as necessary, not as an active choice. 'Being in the hands of expertise' is about the seeking of an answer from a reliable prescriber to the question: 'Is this medication really necessary for me?' Existential labour was done to establish that the practice of taking cardiovascular preventive medication was an inevitable necessity, rather than an active choice. 'Taking medicines no longer a big deal' could be the resulting experience of this process.

CONCLUSIONS

Unmet existential needs when being prescribed cardiovascular preventive medication seem to be a component of the burden of treatment. A continuous and trustful relationship with the prescribing doctor may facilitate the reconciliation of conflicting self-images, and support patients in their efforts to incorporate their medicines taking into daily life.

Women's (limited) agency over their sexual bodies: Contesting contraceptive recommendations in Brazil

Unintended pregnancies constitute a serious public health concern in Brazil, representing up to 55% of all pregnancies, and are prevalent among women with low income and low educational backgrounds. Lack of assistance to women in their decision-making has hindered the adoption of more effective contraceptive models. Although clinical consultations constitute an important locus to assist women in decision-making and to facilitate access to subsidized methods, our current knowledge of how contraception is discussed and decisions are reached in actual consultations is limited. Just as scarce is our knowledge of how patients respond and resist contraception recommendations and how physicians counter or accommodate patients. Using a corpus of 103 audio-recorded medical visits and conversation analytic (CA) methods, this paper examines recommendation sequences in the under-investigated gynecological consultations in the Brazilian public healthcare system (SUS). The quantitative analysis reveals a strong orientation to physicians as having primary rights to govern the oversight of women's bodies: 94% of the recommendations are delivered as pronouncements (e.g., "You'll take X″), the most authoritative action type. Patients largely assume an agreeable and passive role (66%), leading to scarce negotiation and minimal involvement in decision-making. However, in a few cases (12%), all involving contraception, patients become overtly agentive, responding with active resistance. A qualitative analysis of that subset shows that despite women's gaining some agency over their sexual bodies, that agency is still limited. Whereas physicians accommodate patient resistance on grounds of biomedically-related side-effects and incorrect assumptions about the women's lives, they overlook patient resistance based on gendered struggles over contraceptive methods in the domestic sphere. By failing to consider women's lack of agency in choosing whether to have sex or to use condoms, doctors show unawareness of significant consequences of the recommended method, which might include domestic dispute and violence and, paradoxically, ultimately misfire, leading to unwanted pregnancy.

"It's up to me": the experience of patients at high risk of cardiovascular disease of lifestyle change

OBJECTIVE

Despite knowledge of the effect of lifestyle changes in preventing cardiovascular disease, a large proportion of people have unhealthy lifestyle habits. The aim of our study is a) to explore the experiences of participants at high risk of CVD of lifestyle change after participation in a one-year structured lifestyle counselling programme and b) to link the techniques and strategies used by the participants to the processes of the transtheoretical model of behaviour change (TTM).

DESIGN

A qualitative explorative design was used to collect data on participants' experiences. An abductive content analysis was conducted using the processes within TTM for the deductive analysis.

SETTING

Patients that participated in a one-year lifestyle counselling programme in Swedish primary care, were interviewed.

SUBJECTS

Eight men and eight women, aged 51-75 years, diagnosed with hypertension or type 2 diabetes mellitus.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

Experiences of lifestyle change in patients at high cardiovascular risk.

RESULTS

The analysis yielded four dimensions that assisted lifestyle change: 'The value of knowledge', 'Taking control', 'Gaining trust in oneself' and 'Living with a chronic condition'. The theme 'It's up to me' illustrated that lifestyle change was a personal matter and responsibility.

CONCLUSION

Enhanced knowledge, self-efficacy, support from others and the individual's insight that it was his/her own decisions and actions that mattered were core factors to adopt healthier lifestyle habits. Practice Implications: Although lifestyle change is a personal matter, the support provided by primary healthcare professionals and significant others is essential to increase self-efficacy and motivate lifestyle change. Key Points A large proportion of people persist to have unhealthy lifestyle habits also after receiving a diagnosis of hypertension or diabetes mellitus, type 2. This study contributes to enhanced knowledge of how patients experience lifestyle change after counselling in primary care. Both experiential and behavioural processes as defined by the transtheoretical model of behaviour change were used to make lifestyle changes by the patients in this study.

Patient resistance towards clinicians' diagnostic test-taking advice and its management in Chinese outpatient clinic interaction

Performing diagnostic tests is a fundamental information-gathering activity in diagnostic process. However, little attention has been paid to the interactional process where a diagnostic test is advised and received, especially in Chinese medical settings. Decision making over prescribing diagnostic tests consists of clinicians' advice and patients' acceptance or resistance/rejection. Drawing on audio-recordings of clinician-patient encounters in Chinese outpatient clinics as data and conversation analysis as a method, we discuss how patient resistance to clinicians' diagnostic test-taking advice is displayed and managed over sequences of interaction. Two types of advice deliveries have been identified: advice either with no diagnostic utterances or with indeterminate diagnostic utterances. We find that patients demonstrate their resistance towards the former type of advice in two ways: questioning clinicians' decisions and proposing an alternative plan. Displaying resistance to the latter type of advice, patients have been found to recurrently resort to one way: proffering additional information about personal experience. Confronted with resistance, clinicians generally proceed to justify decisions by either asserting their epistemic primacy in determining a test or lowering certainty in the original speculative diagnosis. Towards persistent resistance, clinicians mainly employ two techniques to impose acceptance onto patients: repeating the initial advice and terminating forcefully current sequence. This study adds to a growing body of research on resistance in medical settings and contributes to our understanding of the decision making over medical investigations in Chinese outpatient clinic interaction.

Do patients or their physicians more accurately assess long-term risk associated with hypertension? A population-based study

Objective: To compare the assessments of 10-year probability by patients and their physicians of cardiovascular complications of hypertension with actual outcomes.Design: Patients with uncomplicated hypertension treated with at least one antihypertensive drug at inclusion were followed for 10 years through mandatory national health registers.Setting: 55 primary health care centres, 11 hospital outpatient clinics in SwedenPatients: 848 patient, 212 physicians.Main outcome measures: Patients and physicians estimated the probability of hypertension-related complications with treatment (death, heart failure, acute myocardial infarction/AMI, and stroke) for each patient in 848 pairs. Estimates were compared with the clinical outcomes 10 years later using data from the Mortality Register and the National Patient Register.Results: Patients were significantly better (p < 0.001) than their physicians in estimating the average probability of heart failure compared with actual outcome data (14% vs. 24%, outcome 15%), AMI (16% vs. 26%, outcome 8%), and stroke (15% vs. 25%, outcome 11%). Patients were significantly worse (p < 0.001) at estimating the average probability of death (10% vs. 18%, actual outcome 20%). Neither the patients nor the physicians were able to distinguish reliably between low-risk and high-risk patients after adjustment for age and sex.Conclusions: Patients were better than their physicians in estimating the average probability of morbidity due to hypertension. Both the patients and their attending physicians had difficulty in estimating the individual patient's risk of complications. The results support the use of evidence-based tools in consultations for assessing the risk of cardiovascular complications associated with hypertension.Key points • Shared decision making relies on a common understanding of risks and benefits. Tools for risk assessment of hypertension have been introduced in the last two decades. • Without tools for risk assessment, both patients and physicians had difficulties in estimating the individual patient's risk of cardiovascular morbidity. • Patients were better than physicians in estimating actual average cardiovascular morbidity due to hypertension during a follow-up of 10 years. • The results support the use of evidence-based tools in consultations for assessing the risk of cardiovascular complications associated with hypertension.

Psychiatric service staff perceptions of implementing a shared decision-making tool: a process evaluation study

PURPOSE

Shared decision making, SDM, in psychiatric services, supports users to experience a greater sense of involvement in treatment, self-efficacy, autonomy and reduced coercion. Decision tools adapted to the needs of users have the potential to support SDM and restructure how users and staff work together to arrive at shared decisions. The aim of this study was to describe and analyse the implementation process of an SDM intervention for users of psychiatric services in Sweden.

METHOD

The implementation was studied through a process evaluation utilizing both quantitative and qualitative methods. In designing the process evaluation for the intervention, three evaluation components were emphasized: contextual factors, implementation issues and mechanisms of impact.

RESULTS

The study addresses critical implementation issues related to decision-making authority, the perceived decision-making ability of users and the readiness of the service to increase influence and participation. It also emphasizes the importance of facilitation, as well as suggesting contextual adaptations that may be relevant for the local organizations.

CONCLUSION

The results indicate that staff perceived the decision support tool as user-friendly and useful in supporting participation in decision-making, and suggest that such concrete supports to participation can be a factor in implementation if adequate attention is paid to organizational contexts and structures.

Assessment of goals and priorities in patients with a chronic condition: a secondary quantitative analysis of determinants across 11 countries

OBJECTIVE

To assess the impact of patient characteristics, patient-professional engagement, communication and context on the probability that healthcare professionals will discuss goals or priorities with older patients.

DESIGN

Secondary analysis of cross-sectional data from the 2014 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey of Older Adults.

SETTING

11 western countries.

SUBJECTS

Community-dwelling adults, aged 55 or older.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE

Assessment of goals and priorities.

RESULTS

The final sample size consisted of 17,222 respondents, 54% of whom reported an assessment of their goals and priorities (AGP) by healthcare professionals. In logistic regression model 1, which was used to analyse the entire population, the determinants found to have moderate to large effects on the likelihood of AGP were information exchange on stress, diet or exercise, or both. Country (living in Sweden) and continuity of care (no regular professional or organisation) had moderate to large negative effects on the likelihood of AGP. In model 2, which focussed on respondents who experienced continuity of care, country and information exchange on stress and lifestyle were the main determinants of AGP, with comparable odds ratios to model 1. Furthermore, a professional asking questions also increased the likelihood of AGP.

CONCLUSIONS

Continuity of care and information exchange is associated with a higher probability of AGP, while people living in Sweden are less likely to experience these assessments. Further study is required to determine whether increasing information exchange and professionals asking more questions may improve goal setting with older patients. Key points   A patient goal-oriented approach can be beneficial for older patients with chronic conditions or multimorbidity; however, discussing goals with these patients is not a common practice. The likelihood of discussing goals varies by country, occurring most commonly in the USA, and least often in Sweden. Country-level differences in continuity of care and questions asked by a regularly visited professional affect the goal discussion probability. Patient characteristics, including age, have less impact than expected on the likelihood of sharing goals.