Verbal and Nonverbal Cues in Doctor-Patient Relationships that Promote Compliance of Patients to Prescribed Medications in the Department of Medicine of Philippine General Hospital (PGH)

Abstract

The value of communication in everyone’s lives has been proven by numerous circumstances and incidents that call for an expression of self or a transfer of a message. In the same manner, communication has also been considered as a vital element in the establishment and maintenance of different social networks, service sectors, and personal relationships. One of the relationships where the vitality of communication is considered is the doctor-patient relationship in the healthcare sector. As a role relationship, the doctor and the patient are expected to play their roles during consultations where verbal and non-verbal cues are constantly exchanged in order to achieve patient compliance to the prescribed medications, and hence, the treatment of the health problem. A number of studies have looked into communication in the healthcare context, but none of them identified the roles and effects of communication in various settings. Findings on these related studies revealed that the assessment of communication in teims of patient outcomes has never been investigated, thus presenting a need for a study to fill in this gap of knowledge. Due to this need, an answer is necessary to the following question: What verbal and nonverbal cues in doctor-patient relationships promote patients’ compliance as experienced by the patients of the Department of Medicine of Philippine General Hospital (PGH)? The sub-problems that would aid in answering the posed questions are as follows: 1) What are the demographic profiles of selected medically-related doctors and patients of the Department of Medicine of PGH?; 2) What is the level of compliance of these patients to the treatment program?; 3) Based on the patients’ observations, what communicative skills of the doctors are embedded in their task and socio- emotional orientations? and 4) What verbal and nonverbal cues are sent by the doctors to their patients? How do these influence their compliance to the treatment program? The researcher used communication and psychology approaches for the study. Communication approaches include Schramm’s theory of feedback that explains the interaction process involving continuous exchange of messages and the Relational Communication that discusses how communication affects the behavior. The psychology approach used, on the other hand, is the theory of reasoned action that explains a certain behavior to be caused by various factors such as one’s own beliefs, attitudes, and social norms. The descriptive employed using the techniques of surveys, interviews, and observations. Non-probability sampling is used to gather information. Selected through purposive sampling technique, three doctors and three of their patients were the participants of the study. Tools used were questionnaire, interview schedule, and observation checklist. The data were analyzed using frequencies and ranking for the quantitative data and thematic analysis for the qualitative data. The data revealed that the three selected doctors, who are internal medicine specialists and who have been practicing for two to three years, belong to the 21-30-year-old age group. Their respective patients, on the other hand, belong to the age groups of 31-40, 41-50, 51-60, and 60 years old above. The patients' health problems include heart problems, diabetes, and hypertension, and majority of them have consulted with their respective doctors for more than five times in a span of one to two years; the others have consulted for three times the least in a span of six months to one year. With regard to the patients' compliance level, majority of the patients are fully compliant with their doctor. Only one of them is semi-compliant because of inconsistencies in taking the medication, which according to the doctor is due to financial constraints. The communicative skills of the doctors that are embedded in their task orientation are information-giving and information-seeking, while social conversation, positive talk, and partnership-building are the communicative skills embedded in their socio-emotional orientation. Based on the data gathered, the verbal cues that promote compliance of the patients towards the prescribed medications are those related to the health matters, specifically those that pertain to the diagnosis, information about the health problem, prescription, and words of encouragement. The nonverbal cues that substantiated the verbal cues are touching of the aching body part and those parts affected by the health problem, eye contact, smiles, and emphasis on the words.