Ethnographic analysis of communication and the deaf community's rights in the clinical context

Patients' right to know: A scoping review

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

To analyse research-based evidence about patients' right to know from their own perspective to promote ethically high-quality nursing and to identify future research areas.

BACKGROUND

Patients' right to know is a fundamental right. Although of topical research interest, the current state of scientific evidence on patients' right to know has not been reviewed.

DESIGN

A scoping review according to the methodological framework by Arksey & O'Malley and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews.

METHODS

In June 2022, a literature search was conducted in the Ovid Medline, CINAHL and Cochrane Library databases. The inclusion criteria were peer-reviewed, empirical studies on the right to know with samples comprising adult patients. Data were analysed with inductive content analysis, and methodological quality was assessed with Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool.

RESULTS

Out of 2658 identified reports, 12 were selected for analysis. Based on the results, the research on patients' right to know can be classified into two main content categories: (1) expectations of the right and (2) realisation of the right. In the quality assessment, most of the reports did not meet all the quality criteria, the most common deficits being related to instrumentation and risk of bias.

CONCLUSIONS

Research-based evidence on patients' right to know provided a general insight into expectations and realisation of the right to know and not to know. The results indicate a need for continued efforts for novel approaches with high-quality methodological choices in future studies.

RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE

Nurses make constantly ethical decisions: The findings of this study can be useful for their decision-making and understanding of the patient's perspective on knowledge issues, and therefore, support ethically high-quality patient education.

PATIENT OR PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION

No direct patient or public contribution to the review.

Deafness in the Brazilian care policy: a genealogical analysis

Deafness can be understood from the clinical-therapeutic and the socio-anthropological perspectives. The study aims to perform a genealogical analysis of deafness; that is, an analysis of the practices of knowledge and power in Brazilian health policy. This is a qualitative, documentary study based on the theoretical assumptions of Foucault. Researchers selected 23 documents and conducted eight semi-structured interviews, which were also considered documents, with a non-probabilistic sample using the snowball technique. The genealogical analysis showed that health policies aimed at people with hearing impairment result from the power and knowledge relationships in the field of deafness, in which the medical-pathological discourse is seen as the real perspective, understanding deafness as a disability to be corrected. The socio-anthropological approach, which recognizes the deaf through the perspective of difference and the use of sign language, is a subject discourse that has not found space in health policy. The study highlighted the contradictions between the achievements related to the access to technologies and the propositions of the health sector, whose policy directs its actions exclusively to reach a listening standard, disregarding the multiplicity of deaf individuals.