Abstract
The primary focus of research on the physician-patient relationship has been on patients’ trust in their physicians. In this study, we explored physicians’ trust in their patients. We held semi-structured interviews with expert emergency physicians concerning a patient they had just been managing. The physicians had been equipped with a head-mounted micro camera to film the encounter from an “own point of view perspective”. The footage was used to stimulate recall during the interviews. Several participants made judgments on the reliability of their patients’ accounts from the very beginning of the encounter. If accounts were not deemed reliable, participants implemented a variety of specific strategies in pursuing their history taking, i.e. checking for consistency by asking the same question at several points in the interview, cross-referencing information, questioning third-parties, examining the patient record, and systematically collecting data held to be objective. Our study raises the question of the influence of labeling patients as “reliable” or “unreliable” on their subsequent treatment in the emergency department. Further work is necessary to examine the accuracy of these judgments, the underlying cognitive processes (i.e. analytic versus intuitive) and their influence on decision-making.
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Acknowledgments
We thank all the doctors who took part in the interviews. Their contribution to the research is invaluable. We thank doctors who helped us to recruit. We thank Pierre Paillé, senior qualitative researcher, for his contribution to the study design. We also thank Annick Bourget, Associate Professor and Nicolas Pelaccia, Consultant, for their contribution to this research.
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Statement of human and animal rights
All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The study was approved by both a university ethics committee (Education and Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee of the University of Sherbrooke, Canada—#CER-ESS 2010-71) and a hospital ethics committee (Committee for the Protection of Persons Northwest 2, Amiens University Hospital—#A01586-37).
Informed consent
We obtained written consent from all the interviewees. The patients concerned or trusted third parties received an information leaflet about the study. They were asked to give verbal consent.
Funding
This study was supported by a grant from the French Society for Emergency Medicine (SFMU). The grant was used to buy the camera, and to pay TP’s travel expenses needed for data collection.
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Pelaccia, T., Tardif, J., Triby, E. et al. Do emergency physicians trust their patients?. Intern Emerg Med 11, 603–608 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11739-016-1410-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11739-016-1410-1