Patient-physician communication runs a key thread through EAU23’s Patient Day
At EAU23, Patient Day hit the ground running with its first roundtable discussion on Patient-Physician Communication.
This roundtable struck at the heart of the Patient Office’s ethos, with Ms. Rachel Giles (NL), winner of the Patient Abstract award, opening the discussion by underlining how patient engagement interventions save lives. Its key aims were to show that effective communication between urologists and their patients is vital to improving treatment outcomes and long term patient quality of life. It also highlighted patient needs and values that should be considered by the urologist, but often are not.
There is a large body of RCT-based evidence that patient engagement interventions improve qualitative outcomes, including quality of life, anxiety, depression, compliance, and fatigue. Data suggests a survival benefit for engaged patients, but the experts in the roundtable agreed that additional research is required.
It is important for specialists and patients alike to understand that modern patient advocacy is wholistic in that it directly provides patient support, but also supports and directs research, and shapes health and regulatory policy on the behalf of the patient.
The panel also discussed the importance of fostering good patient-physician communication, what factors cause it to break down, and the strategies that can improve the patient experience.
Tamás Bereczky pointed to the hierarchical nature of healthcare and how that creates barriers to good patient-physician communication. The healthcare system can often place doctors at the top of the hierarchy, while patients are “reduced to a number or a line on an Excel sheet.” This can feed into a system of epistemic injustice, as the patient’s experience can be invalidated on the basis of their hierarchical status.
“It’s a paradigm shift, and that takes time.” – Tamás Bereczky
Best practices should include tackling paternalistic and hierarchical approaches, educating both physicians and patients, limiting jargon and using empathy. Patient experts recommended shifting from only considering “hard” outcomes like time limits and financial constraints, to including soft outcomes like a patient’s emotional state and understanding of their situation. It was agreed by all that this fundamental issue needs to be tackled early in specialists’ medical journeys, potentially starting with training in medical school, and that the subject needs more research and specific guidelines targeting the issue.