Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Structural Implications for Clinical Interactions and the Overlooked Patient

Mon, August 24, 8:30 to 9:30am, TBA

Abstract

Patient centered care promotes trust and better outcomes, and is widely supported by physicians. Research also often links religion and better health. With these points in mind, physicians living in geographic locations with higher concentrations of religious individuals may have more frequent religious conversations with patients. This, however, has not yet been tested. This study begins to fill this gap by testing whether or not patient population characteristics within physician counties are related to the inclusion of religion in clinical interactions. I specify two competing hypotheses: 1) a greater frequency of religious clinical conversations in counties where there are more religious individuals, and hence a greater number of religious patients; 2) physician characteristics, differentially indicating structural relationships carrying implications for role perceptions, predict patient conversations. These role perceptions strongly influence clinical interactions to the near exclusion of considerations for whether or not these perceptions are in line with patient populations, as implied by patient centered care. In other words, the religiosity of the patient population will not matter but the religious orientation and associated clinical schemas of the physician will. A third hypothesis reflects an interaction effect. Merged data from three different sources is used. All models are logistic regressions with the addition of a spatial lag term controlling for the influence of contiguous county religious concentrations for individual physicians. Support is found for the second hypothesis. The importance of different structural associations for physicians’ perception of what a “good” physician does in the clinic is included.

Author