Research project Harnessing healthcare provider’s behavior to improve health outcomes
This trade-off can significantly burden clinicians and patients, and both clinicians’ and patients’ health carry the consequences of such pressure, with increased risk of burnout and ill-health. The challenge thus lies in promoting meaningful patient-provider relationships while handling restrictions in resources. Yet, too little is known about how patient-provider relationships can be effectively secured and improved, and new research is needed to better understand the importance of the patient-provider relationship for health outcomes.
The project aims at determining how healthcare providers’ behavior contribute to health outcomes, and to assess whether modulation of stress responses underlie this effect. Immunological processes will be experimentally activated while manipulating the providers’ behavior: healthy participants will experimentally be made transiently sick using an intravenous injection of a bacterial endotoxin, and healthcare providers will be trained to have augmented (e.g., warm, attentive, caring) versus limited interactions with sick participants. Healthcare providers’ behavior will be rated by participants, as well as objectively from video recordings according to a validated checklist. Objective (fever, immune) and subjective (e.g. sickness symptoms, pain) responses of sick participants, as well as stress and neuroendocrine responses, will be assessed.
Research objectives are:
- Determine the role of healthcare provider’s behavior on sickness outcomes, and explore the weight of each aspect of the healthcare provider’s behavior in these effects;
- Assess the role of stress and neuroendocrine processes in mediating the effect of healthcare provider’s behavior on sickness outcomes, and the possible moderating effect of several sociopsychological predictors.
- Explore how sick individuals overtly express their ill-health and how this relates to the healthcare provider’s behavior.