The importance of dialogue: communication strategy for empowerment of low-income African American patients via in-depth interviews of primary care providers at inner-city health clinics

ABSTRACT

Purpose: We explored how primary care providers perceive their interactions with low-income African American patients at two inner-city health clinics.

Background: Drawing from theories of empowerment and community development, we asked what types of communication strategies health care providers consider crucial for creating/maintaining empowered low-income African American patients.

Method: We conducted twelve in-depth interviews and performed data analysis to identify recurring themes and report them within the scope of the qualitative nature of the current data.

Results: Healthcare providers reported that they are fully aware of and actively use the patient-centered/collaborative strategies identified in the literature. They expressed their desire/willingness to work with their patients as partners in patient health management/improvement rather than simply instructing them. They also prefer highly motivated patients to improve their own health outcomes.

Conclusion: Overall findings suggest providers, working in inner-city health clinics, understand and use accommodating/collaborating and patient-centered strategies daily to empower their low-income African American patients.

KEYWORDS:

• Patient empowerment
• physician-patient relations
• healthcare delivery
• primary care
• African-American patients
• underserved populations

Ethical approval

All research reported in submitted papers has been conducted in an ethical and responsible manner, and is in full compliance with all relevant codes of experimentation and legislation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Rania W. Frederick (Ph.D. 2013, University of Florida) is a public relations scholar who is interested in investigating effective communication strategies to empower low-income, underprivileged populations.

Moon J. Lee (Ph.D. 2001, University of Florida) is an associate professor in the Department of Public Relations at the University of Florida. Lee’s research focuses primarily on development and evaluation of new media technologies, health communication/promotion, information-processing and decision-making of individuals regarding their health, government public relations, and social media. Her research focuses on how viewers perceive different types of media messages and how to design effective health communication campaign messages to empower individuals to adopt a healthier behavior. Her research has been published in Health Communication, the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, and Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. Lee is working on several research projects, identifying how to empower low-income, underprivileged populations for the prevention and intervention of critical health problems such as obesity, smoking, drinking, and skin-cancer.

ORCID

Moon J. Lee https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3167-8562