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Abstract
Over 8% of children have a chronic disease and many are unable to adhere to treatment. Satisfaction with chronic disease care can impact adherence. We examine how visit satisfaction is associated with physician communication style and ongoing physician-family relationships. We collected surveys and visit videos for 75 children ages 9–16 years visiting for asthma, diabetes, or sickle cell disease management. Raters assessed physician communication style (friendliness, interest, responsiveness, and dominance) from visit videos. Quality of the ongoing relationship was measured with four survey items (parent-physician relationship, child-physician relationship, comfort asking questions, and trust in the physician), while a single item assessed satisfaction. Correlations and chi square were used to assess association of satisfaction with communication style or quality of the ongoing relationship. Satisfaction was positively associated with physician to parent (p < 0.05) friendliness. Satisfaction was also associated with the quality of the ongoing parent-physician (p < 0.001) and child-physician relationships (p < 0.05), comfort asking questions (p < 0.001), and trust (p < 0.01). This shows that both the communication style and the quality of the ongoing relationship contribute to pediatric chronic disease visit satisfaction.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We gratefully acknowledge participation by UW Hospital and Clinics as well as Children's Hospital of Wisconsin. ProKids group members helped with collection of surveys and videos. Additionally Meaghan Berigan prepared the manuscript for publication. This project was funded by the Community–Academic Partnerships core of the University of Wisconsin Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (UW ICTR), funded through an NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA), grant number 1 UL1 RR025011. The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.