Helping Patients Get What They Need: Persuading Health Care Providers of Perceived Threat and Positive Outcome Expectations

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Health care provider-patient relationships are the cornerstone to effective health care. Patients enter into these fiduciary relationships expecting that health care providers will offer the best care possible to the patient. As patients, traditionally, we have been socialized to passively accept the care that is offered (Robinson, 2003). Newer approaches to health care and models of trusting relationships, however, have offered the opportunity for patients to actively participate in their care. For example, patients now are more often encouraged to take an active role in their health care instead of submissively following the directions of an authoritative health care provider (Brann, 2011). More people are entering into partnerships with their health care providers because it offers them an opportunity to work with health care providers to influence decision making (Beck, Ragan, & du Pré, 1997). Patients are actively taking responsibility for their care and treatment. Health care providers, in turn, are approaching patients as complex beings who need not only physical health, but also emotional, mental, psychological, and spiritual health. In many instances, this biopsychosocial approach to health care is replacing, or at least supplementing, the traditional biomedical approach (Frankel & Quill, 2005).