1A thorough examination of Chinese public hospitals with a focus on the diagnosis procedure and patient-physician communication

Abstract

This study examines the many ways in which patients respond to their doctors' explanations of diagnostic analyses as well as the methods in which physicians explain these analyses to their patients. This study focuses on how patients react to the explanations provided by their physicians. The findings indicate that primary care doctors in China often employ the exclusionary strategy when diagnosing patients. Medical testing (clinical tests) is usually done in primary care consultations to validate the emerging diagnosis. Furthermore, the way in which patients describe their symptoms does not correspond with the views held by the experts. It has been noted that the diagnostic process is dynamic and occurs at almost all levels of the collected consultations. Due to these findings, the diagnosis process is now a continuous process that takes a considerable amount of time to complete (e.g., evaluating the symptoms, elucidating the cause of the symptoms, offering a provisional diagnosis, and drawing a final diagnosis) rather than a single step (Byrne and Long, 1976).