Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan, Department of Psychology, Milan, Italy.
PLoS One. 2012;7(11):e48297. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0048297. Epub 2012 Nov 1.
The comprehension of appropriate information about illnesses and treatments, can have beneficial effects on patients' satisfaction and on important health outcomes. However, it is questionable whether people are able to understand risk properly.
To describe patients' representation of risk in common medical experiences by linking such a representation to the concept of trust. A further goal was to test whether the representation of risk in the medical domain is associated to the level of expertise. The third goal was to verify whether socio-demographic differences influence the representation of risk.
Eighty voluntary participants from 6 health-centers in northern Italy were enrolled to conduct a semi-structured interview which included demographic questions, term-associations about risk representation, closed and open questions about attitudes and perception of risk in the medical context, as well as about medical expertise and trust.
The results showed that people do not have in mind a scientific definition of risk in medicine. Risk is seen as a synonym for surgery and disease and it is often confused with fear. However, general knowledge of medical matters helps people to have a better health management through risk identification and risk information, adoption of careful behaviors and tendency to have a critical view about safety and medical news. Finally, trust proved to be an important variable in risk representation and risk and trust were correlated positively.
People must receive appropriate information about the risks and benefits of treatment, in a form that they can understand and apply to their own circumstances. Moreover, contemporary health policy should empower patients to adopt an active self-care attitude. Methodologies to enhance people's decision-making outcomes based on better risk communication should be improved in order to enable low literacy population as well elderly people to better understand their treatment and associated risk.
理解疾病和治疗的相关信息可能会对患者的满意度和重要的健康结果产生有益的影响。然而，人们是否能够正确理解风险是值得怀疑的。
通过将这种代表性与信任的概念联系起来，描述患者在常见医疗经历中对风险的代表性。进一步的目标是检验在医学领域中对风险的代表性是否与专业水平相关。第三个目标是验证社会人口统计学差异是否会影响风险的代表性。
从意大利北部的 6 家医疗中心招募了 80 名自愿参与者进行半结构化访谈，其中包括人口统计学问题、与风险代表性相关的术语联想、关于风险态度和感知的封闭和开放问题、以及关于医疗专业知识和信任的问题。
结果表明，人们脑海中并没有医学中风险的科学定义。风险被视为手术和疾病的同义词，并且经常与恐惧混淆。然而，对医学事务的一般了解有助于人们通过识别风险和风险信息、采取谨慎行为以及对安全和医疗新闻持批评态度来更好地管理健康。最后，信任被证明是风险代表性和风险的一个重要变量，并且两者之间呈正相关。
人们必须以他们能够理解和应用于自己情况的形式获得关于治疗风险和益处的适当信息。此外，当代健康政策应该赋予患者积极的自我保健态度。应该改进基于更好的风险沟通来增强人们决策结果的方法，以使低识字率人群和老年人能够更好地理解他们的治疗和相关风险。
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