Trust is fundamental to successful health care, but too often the relationships between health care recipients and providers are compromised by anxiety, fear and dread. Flinders University researchers have found this doesn’t have to be the case – and that solutions are easily attained.
Dr Rebecca Feo, from Flinders University’s Caring Futures Institute, has investigated how Health providers can develop high-quality relationships with the people they care for.
While professional caregiving relationships are central to quality healthcare, Dr Feo’s research has found these are not always developed to a consistently high standard in clinical practice.
“Research shows that when receiving care, people value the relationships they develop with healthcare providers but, in practice, the quality of these relationships is highly variable, and this can prevent the effective delivery of care,” says Dr Feo.
Dr Feo says she observed great inconsistencies in existing research about what constitutes high-quality relationships between health providers and care recipients – and the need for a clear and focused definition of quality relationships directed the purpose of her research project.
“The quality of the relationship that people have with heath care providers are what they remember most about the care they receive, however they can sometimes struggle to articulate exactly what makes a good relationship,” says Dr Feo. “This is precisely what I wanted this research project to unpack.”
Dr Feo conducted a study that explored how 35 healthcare recipients and 37 carers conceptualise good professional caregiving relationships, regardless of the specific health discipline, care setting or clinical condition. They were asked to complete stories from brief prompts, which illustrated how they make sense of and perceive relationships with care providers.
The 72 participants’ stories highlighted that being introduced to new providers can trigger unwanted emotions, such as anxiety, fear and dread, for both recipients and carers.
“Specifically, there was a fear expressed by research participants that health providers would dismiss their concerns and judge them for deciding to seek help,” says Dr Feo.
By comparison, good relationships developed when healthcare providers worked to relieve or minimise these unwanted emotions, ensuring that both healthcare recipients and their carers feel comfortable and at ease with the provider and the encounter.
Participants said they felt that healthcare providers are primarily responsible for relieving recipients’ and carers’ unwanted emotions.
“They said this can be achieved via four approaches: easing into the encounter, demonstrating interest in and an understanding of recipients’ problems, validating recipients’ problems, and by enabling and respecting recipients’ choices.”
The findings suggest that high-quality relationships depend on a consistent core of healthcare provider behaviours. “Embedding these behaviours in interprofessional education and multidisciplinary healthcare delivery will enable different healthcare disciplines and teams to share a common understanding of what is required to develop high-quality relationships,” says Dr Feo.
“Better still, care recipients respond very positively to a high-quality relationship and this leads to them providing better and more extensive information to health professions, which in turn leads to better management of health problems and better care experiences.
“Our findings will serve as a very valuable reminder to all clinicians about what it feels like to be a recipient of care – and for health care students, it will emphasise what care recipients focus on the most, underlining how they want to be treated.”
The research – ‘I wasn’t made to feel like a nut case after all’: A qualitative story completion study exploring healthcare recipient and carer perceptions of good professional caregiving relationships, by Rebecca Feo, Jessica Young, Kristi Urry, Michael Lawless, Sarah Hunter, Alison Kitson and Tiffany Conroy – has been published in Health Expectations.
Dr Feo’s findings will now be the subject of a short video made by Frankie Films, a South Australian video production company, with cleverly dramatized scripts to make the messages for positive change more engaging.
The video is expected to be completed by the middle of 2025, and Dr Feo hopes it will be freely available to the public via the Caring Futures Institute website, and also be used within educational materials for student health workers.