Biomedical subjects

P J Cruickshank

Publications and source records attributed to P J Cruickshank.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1985

Patient rating of doctors using computers.

In order to shed some light on the impact of a computer on medical consultations, 140 new hospital out-patients rated the doctor they had just seen, and their ideal doctor using a 38-item semantic differential-type scale. Sixty-four of the patients had experienced a computer being used by one of the three doctors participating in the study. Each patient's ratings of a doctor were compared with their ratings of the ideal doctor by paired t-tests. The doctors, when using the computer, tended to be seen as less matching up to these ideals than when they did not use the computer. All three received more non-ideal ratings when using the computer. However, this was less so for two of the doctors than for the third, who with a computer was seen as less than ideally listening and paying attention, and was also rated as less than ideally warm, friendly, liking and comforting, perhaps surprisingly, this doctor had tried to minimize the effect of the computer during the consultation, while the doctor who used the computer 'conversationally' during the interview was rated overall as better with it than without it. It would appear that the pattern of computer use in the consultation and even its apparent intrusiveness need not have an adverse effect on patient ratings of doctors, but that computer use can cause problems for this aspect of the doctor-patient relationship.

Adult↗

PubMed1984

A stress and arousal mood scale for low vocabulary subjects: a reworking of Mackay et al. (1978).

In an experiment investigating patient mood in an out-patient setting, a Mood Adjective Checklist (Mackay et al., 1978) was administered to 189 patients before and after their consultations, obtaining 366 completed questionnaires. Both the stress and arousal scales in the Mackay et al. checklist contain unequal numbers of positive and negative items, and are thus subject to response bias. When the results were analysed, it was noted that some items in the checklist led to large numbers of question mark responses, and it was discovered that word frequency, used as an estimate of word unfamiliarity, was correlated with the use of the question mark. Furthermore, when question mark responses were treated as missing data, as recommended by Meddis (1972), the factor analytic distinction between stress and arousal disappeared. Next, items giving rise to 15 per cent or more question mark responses were omitted from analysis, and the remaining items factor analysed. The resulting checklist comprised nine high stress items, nine low stress items, four high arousal items and four low arousal items. Mackay et al.'s stress and arousal scales were reconstructed using these items; they were no longer subject to response bias, and were more accessible to low vocabulary subjects.

Adult↗

PubMed1984

Computers in medicine: patients' attitudes.

Data are presented from two surveys where a 26-item questionnaire was used to measure patients' attitudes to diagnostic computers and to medical computers in general. The first group of respondents were 229 patients who had been given outpatient appointments at a hospital general medical clinic specializing in gastrointestinal problems, where some had experienced a diagnostic computer in use. The second group of respondents were 416 patients attending a group general practice where there was no computer. Patients who had experience of the diagnostic computer or a personal computer had more favourable attitudes to computers in medicine as did younger people and males. The two samples of patients showed broadly similar attitudes, and a notable finding was that over half of each group believed that, with a computer around, the personal touch of the doctor would be lost.

Attitude↗

PubMed1982

Patient stress and the computer in the consulting room.

This study assesses patient reactions to the use of diagnostic computers by doctors. The setting was a hospital out-patient clinic, and the patients were new referrals with dyspeptic symptoms. Patient reactions were measured through a mood questionnaire of stress and arousal, and a questionnaire on attitudes to the medical use of computers. Patient self-reported stress was more likely to have increased after the consultation if the computer had been used (P less than 0.05). There was a trend for computer patients to show attenuation of the typical post-consultation drop in stress. However, patients who had experienced the computer being used had more favourable attitudes towards medical computer use that inexperienced patients (as assessed by a subsequent postal survey; P = 0.007). Multiple regression showed that while experience of the computer was a determinant of attitudes, patient stress after the consultation was extremely significant (P less than 0.001) with highly-stressed patients being the least welcoming to medical computers, whether or not they had experience of the computer. It is suggested that doctors planning to use computers should take care to preserve their 'human touch' particularly for nervous patients.

Adult↗