Does Your Doctor Trust You?
Members of the American public are frequently surveyed about their trust in various professionals. Doctors and nurses usually wind up near the top of the list, especially when compared to lawyers, hairdressers and politicians. Trust in professionals is important to us: they possess expertise we lack but need, to solve problems ranging from the serious (illness) to the relatively trivial (appearance).
How much professionals trust us seems irrelevant: our reciprocity is expressed in the form of payment for services rendered or promised, our recommendations to friends and families and repeat appearances.
So I was surprised to read an article in the Annals of Family Medicine describing a new scale to measure doctors’ trust in their patients. This scale, based on input from focus groups and validation surveys of physicians, was developed for research purposes on the grounds that trust is a “feature of the clinician-patient relationship that resonates with both patients and clinicians.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at CFAH PPF Blog*