No trust, no us (R Southgate)

• 

When going to hospitals, clinics, doctors or any medical institutions, you do not know what to expect. As soon as you walk into the room, watching helpers rush around to make sure every patient is helped, the atmosphere is thick with tension and has a faint smell of antiseptic in the air, your nerves spike up to 100. This is where patient- provider relationship comes into play. Patients are already anxious enough having to deal with pain, waiting period anxiety and everything that comes after where health professionals deal with their own difficulties as well and an incompliant patient is the last thing they want. Patients would be less jumpy if trust was present between patients and helpers. The quality of services would be so much more efficient. There are two types of patients that are found when thinking about these trust relationships: the too trusting patient and the patient that has too little trust. Patients that trusts too much are more common than those that trust too little and these patients think of health professionals as Gods that can fix any problem they have being it mental or physical. This puts a lot of pressure on the helpers, as patients tend to get difficult when treatment takes a wrong turn or is not working fast enough. It is understandable that patients make quick choices about their health without fully understanding the consequences when they are in so much pain. These ‘Gods’ suddenly become Satan. The picture represents the patient and caregiver where the patient trusts the medical practitioner even though this person is a stranger to them. They have never met this person before yet they are asked to trust them with their lives. Which is similar to the picture because just like doing a trust fall, you don’t know if you’ll fall or if this person will catch you.

According to an article found in the Journal of Nursing and Health Studies, building a positive trust relationship makes for more efficient service delivery and patient satisfaction. There are three major factors that are looked at to get a good trust relationship between clients and medical professionals: empathy, communication and power. Empathy is a much spoken about feeling in the medical field and it is a big contributing feature when trying to make the person feel secure and that the professional is being considerate of their feelings and their circumstances. They enjoy feeling that they are people and not an object or type of disease that the therapist is trying to heal. Having clear communication about the clients’ condition as well as everything that comes with it is essential. When patients come in, they are sometimes too scared to ask questions because they think it is a silly question therefore by the helper explaining everything they need to know they will not have to feel that way. Inpatients sometimes feel like they are below practitioners and they are not educated ‘enough’ to understand what they are saying or the importance of something. When there is an understanding of respect within the patient- provider relationship, power is not an issue. Physiotherapy could be looked at in this context as physiotherapists are in contact with the person a lot and monitors the patient’s condition closely. They also assist these people when they are in extreme amounts of pain and they do not want to do anything but rest so they can recover. I agree that this is a problem in the South African health system even though a small one, a problem none the less.

References:

1. Lan, Y. and Hua Yan, Y. (2017). The Impact of Trust, Interaction, and Empathy in Doctor-Patient Relationship on Patient Satisfaction. Journal of Nursing and Health Studies, 02(02).
2. Trust and communication in Doctor- patient relationship: A literature review. (2019).Journal of Healthcare Communications, [online] 3, p.3. Available at: http://healthcare-communications.imedpub.com/archive.php [Accessed 21 Jun. 2018].