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Health Care Reform and Patients' Trust in Physicians in Urban Beijing*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2012

Waikeung Tam
Waikeung Tam*
Affiliation:
Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Email: waikeungtam@gmail.com
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Abstract

The Chinese health care system has experienced profound changes in recent decades, including the retrenchment of government financial support. These changes and their subsequent adverse impacts have prompted the Chinese media and some academics to suggest that patients have a relatively low level of trust in physicians in China today. As the first step in exploring the state of patient trust in physicians in public hospitals in urban China, and its determinants, we conducted a survey of 434 patients from 26 public hospitals in urban Beijing between December 2009 and January 2010. Conducted by the Horizon Research Group, our survey asked the patient respondents how they viewed the physicians they were currently seeing, focusing on the following dimensions of trust: physician agency, technical competence, interpersonal competence, and information provided by physicians. Our survey results show a relatively high level of patients' trust in their physicians. Moreover, our in-patient respondents reported a higher level of trust than out-patient respondents with regard to physician agency, interpersonal competence and information provision. Regression analyses also find that patients' self-reported health status, the level of public hospitals from which they received treatment, the duration of their illness, and the frequency of exposure to negative media reports of physicians and hospitals are important determinants of patients' trust in physicians.

Keywords

patient–physician relationshiptrusthealth careChina
Type
Research Report
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 211 , September 2012 , pp. 827 - 843
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2012 

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Footnotes

*

Research for this study was supported by the LKY School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.

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