Positively-oriented Doctor-Patient Verbal Interaction And Patient Satisfaction

Doctor-patient interaction is regarded as the main ingredient in medical care. And recently interaction between doctors and patients is attracting an increasing amount of attention within linguistic, psychological and health care researches. Although the study of doctor-patient interaction has already been a hot topic of academic investigation, relevant researches seem to be somewhat scattered and lack strong theoretical support.This thesis first reviews the previous studies concerning doctor-patient interaction. And with the development of positive psychology as well as the application of quantitative analysis in linguistic researches, the author makes a tentative study to investigate the correlation between positively-oriented doctor-patient verbal interaction and patient satisfaction, which constitutes the first part of the "medical care value chain" introduced by the author.By detailed analysis of the data collected which include the amount of doctor's positively-oriented expressions in medical consultation, the score of Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire, and the duration of each medical consultation, the research demonstrates the strong correlation between doctor's positively-oriented expressions in medical consultation and patient satisfaction, and proposes that in medical consultations doctors should actively offer positive psychological intervention to their patients in fulfilling patient's psychological needs.Besides, the results of the present research indirectly demonstrate the necessity of the change from previous bio-medical model to today's bio-psycho-social model in medical care. It appeals to doctors to pay more attention to their interactional skills with patients in order to improve the healing potential of medical consultations, and thus to improve patient satisfaction and the quality of medical care.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter one makes a brief introduction to the whole thesis. Chapter two makes an overview of the studies pertaining to doctor-patient interaction in several aspects including different perspectives of study, different approaches and different purposes of doctor-patient interaction. Chapter three deals with the theoretical foundations of this study. Chapter four concentrates on the details concerning the method of collecting and transcribing data and the analytic procedures to be applied in this research. Chapter five is the focus of this research, in which a detailed analysis of the data and the investigation into the relationship between positively-oriented doctor-patient interaction and patient satisfaction is carried out. The last chapter, chapter six, serves as the conclusion of the thesis, major findings, implications and limitations of the study are illuminated.