How patients experience being cared for in healthcare settings? v2.2
Research type
Research Study
Full title
How do patients experience being cared for in healthcare settings?
IRAS ID
182449
Contact name
Tim Dornan
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Queen's University Belfast
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 6 months, 31 days
Research summary
People throughout the world share a concern that students leave medical school less empathic than when they entered it. Public concern about failings of care in the mid-Staffordshire hospitals has made empathy a pressing social issue in the UK. Scholars have written about the nature and importance of empathy, compassion, and other “prosocial“ types of behaviour by health professionals but differ in their definitions of the terms and the importance they ascribe to them. What they have rarely done is to ask lay people, whose views are most important.
We propose to conduct ‘phenomenological’ research. This is grounded in a school of philosophy, which holds that attentive researchers can access and interpret people’s ‘lived experiences’ and provide important social insights by listening very carefully and analyzing what they say.
Under the guidance of an expert phenomenologist and senior doctors-cum-education researchers, a medical student will, with the help of general practitioners, recruit up to 20 people, including men and women, younger and older people, people who are well, and people who have chronic illnesses. During single audio-recorded research interviews, she will ask them to talk her through one or more incidents in which they experienced a health professional caring for them well. She will ask them to use coloured ‘post-its’ to map out their experiences. This so-called Pictor interviewing technique is an established way of helping lay people give rich accounts of important health experiences.
The student, supported by her supervisory team, will use so-called ‘template analysis’ method to build an interpretation of the essential qualities of caring doctors, as defined by lay people’s experiences. She will disseminate the findings by spreading them among students, teachers, and lay people, publishing in journals, and presenting at conferences.
REC name
HSC REC A
REC reference
15/NI/0172
Date of REC Opinion
9 Oct 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion