Search

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly changed the lives of a majority of the world's population. People have been encouraged to implement social distancing behaviors enforced by governments, and have experienced loss of employment or changes to their usual working environment. In the mental health sector, psychologists and psychiatrists have been forced to alter the standard care of patients without compromising safety. This article documents the experiences of the authors – mental health professionals in four countries, Canada, Russia, Australia and Japan – at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, and offers recommendations on how clinical, training, and research practices may need to be adjusted to deal with lockdown situations. Clinicians adapted their usual best practices by learning new skills and updating their knowledge base. Mental health clinicians noticed that the pandemic led to symptomatic changes in some of their patients. Most clinicians moved towards providing telemental health services, such as conducting assessments and treatments remotely. Those who continued seeing patients in person employed personal protective equipment with various impacts on the clinician–patient relationship. The dilemmas of mass quarantines need to be carefully examined, as their effects on numerous health and psychosocial variables appear to be far-reaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patient satisfaction is important to patient outcomes. Previous attempts to conceptualize satisfaction have often taken an atheoretical approach and focused on doctors' communication skills. Patients are becoming more active health consumers involved in their health care and current definitions of patient satisfaction may not accurately reflect patient expectations about their health consultations. Earlier research found that meeting patients' emotional needs - through empathy and patient-centered communication - is important to patient satisfaction. New research is needed to explore how those needs can be met given the changing trend in patient behaviors and the focus on patient-centredness. This study employed two communication theories - the Willingness to Communicate Model and Communication Accommodation Theory - to consider both patients' communicative decisions, and the intergroup features of the health context that can influence communicative behaviors. Two hundred and fiftythree patients from health clinics in Canada and Australia described what satisfaction meant to them, and identified what aspects of their health consultation were satisfying (or not), and we investigated their perceptions of doctor's emotional expression. Results suggest that patient perceptions of their participation in the consultation predicts their perceptions of doctor emotional expression, and their satisfaction with the consultation. Patients want both emotional and medical needs met in an environment that balances interpersonal and intergroup communication. Our findings suggest the need to expand current definitions of patient satisfaction, patient-centredness and emotional expression. We discuss the implications of these findings for health practitioners and consider future research that addresses the need for more individualized health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]