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Why Patient Advocacy? Key Concepts
A guiding principle of medical ethics is respect for patient autonomy: your right to
make personal decisions about matters affecting your health.
To exercise this right, you must truly understand your treatment options. Only by
understanding your options can you give informed consent for treatment.
Patient advocacy recognizes the importance of your personal preferences and values in
medical decision making.
The goal of patient advocacy is for you to obtain the best health care available and
support you in the process of making medical decisions.
Barriers to Medical Decision Making
Patient advocacy can help you identify and overcome the following barriers that may
affect your decision making.
- The appeal of zero risk: Even well accepted treatments are imperfect, and good
treatments sometimes yield poor outcomes. Risk cannot be entirely eliminated, yet you may
be tempted to choose treatment options with high costs (time, discomfort, risk of
treatment-associated harm, or material costs) with little gain in risk reduction.
- Bias in decision making, which includes:
- - friends' and family members' experiences
- - vivid memories
- - the appeal of certainty
- - competing multiple options
- - categorizing situations as completely safe or completely dangerous rather than
recognizing variations of safety or danger
- - immediate vs. future outcomes and costs
- - heuristics (short cuts in thinking), which may make decisions easier but also lead to
bias
- Emotions and beliefs: Upon hearing bad news regarding your health, you may feel awash in
emotion, and your confidence and self-assurance may be rocked. Your feelings and beliefs
may overwhelm rational thought.
- Pressure from family and friends: Support from loved ones may give you strength when you
face a difficult situations. But strong expressions of their beliefs and opinions can be
confusing and difficult to oppose.
- Doctors' opinions: The intention of health care providers is to serve your best
interest. Their perspective comes from their experience and training. However, they
may not emphasize alternatives outside their particular experience or specialty.
Benefits of Patient Advocacy
Patient advocacy offers many benefits, including:
- Presentation of health care information in a clear and understandable manner, tailored
to your particular needs
- Identification of barriers to decision making or health care and approaches to overcome
them
- Consideration of strategies to obtain the best health care available
- Objectivity and support in stressful times
For more examples of how patient advocacy can benefit you, please see Patient Advocate Services.
Tools for Patient Advocacy
I use a variety of tools in patient advocacy, including these two.
- Evidence based medicine: In the 1990s it became normative practice to apply objective
and quantifiable estimates of variables studied in research protocols into clinical
settings. I apply data and research results to medical decision making. Then I frame
objective evidence to accommodate your individual needs.
- Decision Analysis: Decision analysis starts with a medical problem and compares the
clinical choices or strategies available to respond to the problem. By using this
systematic approach, probabilities or uncertainties can be more explicitly discussed, and
personal preferences can be incorporated in decision making.
For more
information, please see Patient Advocate Services or Contact Me. |
