Patients are now taking more participation in the decision-making process of medical treatment than ever before. Patient's participation in the process often leads to a shared decision-making(SDM) among patients, family members, doctors and nurses. Th...
Patients are now taking more participation in the decision-making process of medical treatment than ever before. Patient's participation in the process often leads to a shared decision-making(SDM) among patients, family members, doctors and nurses. The SDM seems to become a trend as medical knowledges have become more ubiquitous and as the patient's rights to know and to choose medical treatments for oneself have recently been introduced in the medical practices. The SDM contributes to bring about an effective health care system by helping a patient become a more engaged and active partner in the medical treatment. And yet, few studies have been done on the SDM in Korea, particularly on the participation of older patients in the decision-making process of the medial treatment.
This case study focuses on the older cancer patients' participation in the medical treatment process. The reasons for studying their participation in the treatment process are several folds; First, previous studies report that age is an important factor of a decision for the medical treatment. Secondly, older patients are increasing rapidly as Korea becomes an aging society. Thirdly, cancer is the number one cause of the older persons' death rates.
A primary research question of this study is "How older cancer patients perceive their illnesses and How they participate in the medical treatment decision-making process." For this case study the ethnographic research method was employed, and six older cancer patients, their families, and health professionals such as doctors and nurses involved in those patients' treatments were interviewed from December 2008 to April 2009. The interviews were all recorded with their consents on the spot, and observations during the interviews were also made and written down instantaneously.
The major finding of the study are as follows:
First, both older cancer patients and their family members were cooperated in the decisions for the medical treatments.
Secondly, the perceptions of older cancer patients of their illnesses have been categorized into three types: "Facing", "Getting to know", and "Averting".
Thirdly, those perception types have affected differently to the medical treatments, particularly to the shared decision-making among the patient, family members, doctors and nurses. "Facing" is a type that a patient knows his or her diagnosis and faces the situation actively. Patients with such a type showed their willingness to fight against cancer. Their family members were also willing to give and share informations on the medical treatments with the patients. In these cases active shared decision-making based on the informations was followed. "Getting to know" is a type that a patient gets to know his or her illness little by little as family members do not let the patient know all the informations they have and hide some informations from the patient. Although family members do so by thinking that such hiding information would help the patient, he or she slowly becomes to know his or her illness as one gets medical treatments for cancer. In these cases passive shared decision-making was followed due to the limited informations from the family members. "Averting" is a type that a patient refuses stubbornly to accept his or her illness even in the case one could fully know his or her diagnosis. In the 'Averting' cases, even though this type of patients seemed to pretend not to care about the diagnoses of their illnesses, their ears were wide open to the whisperings around them and they waited their family members to decide first while not telling them to do so. Informations were not shared and thus a shared decision-making was done between doctors and family members only as the patient didn't participate in the treatment process.
And finally, an interesting but maybe a significant case for a further study was found in this case study. It is that while a patient already had a preference in mind for a particular treatment, the patient hesitated to reveal and share the preference with family members. The main reason for such hesitation was the older patients' perception of a conventional social wisdom that they should not leave economic burdens of high medical costs that family members could not afford.
This study concludes with some practical and policy implications for a nursing plan for older cancer patients and medical treatment. For instance, when a nursing care plan is prepared, a tool for identifying older cancer patient's perception schemes needs to be developed. And considering the older cancer patient's conventional social wisdom, government may need a policy particularly for those poor older cancer patients.