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This study aims to explore the role of interactants' nonverbal sensitivity, anxiety and sociodemographic characteristics in learning and satisfaction within the genetic counseling context.

This is a combined simulation and analogue study. Simulations were videotaped with 152 prenatal and cancer genetic counselors and nine simulated clients. The videotapes were shown to 559 subjects recruited to act as analogue clients (ACs) with the instruction to imagine themselves as the client in the simulation. The profile of nonverbal sensitivity (PONS), a video and audio test of accuracy in the interpretation of nonverbal cues, was administered to both the genetic counselors and ACs. In addition, the ACs completed a literacy screen and post session measures of learning and session satisfaction.

The study finds that ACs' post‐session knowledge score was positively associated with both their own and the counselors' audio PONS scores. Also related to knowledge were clients' literacy, younger age and non‐minority ethnicity. Ratings of session satisfaction were inversely related to ACs' and counselors' video PONS scores and ACs' literacy and anxiety.

While based on the performance of a large number of practicing genetic counselors, simulated and analogue clients are used to explore study questions.

The nonverbal sensitivity of both providers and ACs plays a role in medical communication and its cognitive and affective consequences. These findings warrant greater attention to nonverbal dynamics in future research and interventions.

No similar studies have investigated the role of nonverbal sensitivity in predicting learning and satisfaction for users of health care services.

The purpose of this paper is to report on gender differences in emergency physicians with respect to their attitudes, knowledge, and practices concerning health promotion and disease prevention.

A mail survey of 325 male and 97 female Canadian emergency physicians.

Results suggest female emergency physicians report having greater knowledge of health promotion topics, spend more time with each of their patients in the emergency setting, and engage in more health promotion counseling in the emergency setting than do their male counterparts.

The paper argues that in the future, educating and socializing emergency physicians, both male and female, in the practice of health promotion will enhance the potential of the emergency department to be a more effective resource for their community.

The purpose of this paper is to identify customers’ service network partners in medical encounters and demonstrate the extent to which customers’ evaluation of each co-creation practice with their service network partners affects their perceived service quality and satisfaction. In addition, the moderating effect of patient age is examined.

By using a field survey, data collected from 164 inpatients were examined through structural equation modeling and multi-group analysis.

The value-creating activities of customers with service providers, companions and other customers during healthcare service encounters have a positive effect on their perception of service quality and satisfaction related to behavioral intentions. Co-creating with service value network partners has a greater impact on perceived service quality and service satisfaction for patients aged 60 or older.

By focusing on participants in customers’ service value co-creating networks, this study contributes to the body of knowledge by confirming the importance of each actor and analyzing customers’ value co-creating activities.

This is the first study to show that when customers’ level of involvement is high, such as in healthcare services, their value-creating activities when interacting with medical staff, companions and other patients positively affect perceived service quality and satisfaction.

The medical consultation is one of the requirements in diseases diagnosis and patient treatment. In addition, a high-quality consultation is a fundamental demand of patients, and it is one of the rights of every patient. The purpose of this paper is to identify factors affecting the high-quality consultation in medical communications.

The following electronic databases were searched: MEDLINE (via PubMed), Web of Science, Cochrane, EMBASE, Scopus and ProQuest until December 2018. In addition, the authors searched Google Scholar. Qualitative and quantitative studies were assessed using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme, Qualitative Checklist and the Center for Evidence-Based Management appraisal checklist, respectively. A stepwise approach was conducted for data synthesis.

Of 3,826 identified studies, 29 met the full inclusion criteria. Overall, after quality assessment of studies, 25 studies were included. The studies were conducted in the USA (n=6), the UK (n=6), the Netherlands (n=4), Canada (n=2), Belgium (n=2), Poland (n=2), Germany (n=1), Iran (n=1), Finland (n=1), Austria (n=1), Qatar (n=1), Denmark (n=1) and China (n=1), and five studies were excluded. Data synthesis showed that high-quality consultation consisted of three main categories: structural (4 main themes with 26 sub-themes), process (2 main themes with 33 sub-themes) and outcome (3 main themes with 12 sub-themes) quality.

Using the indicators of consultation quality improvement can develop physicians’ clinical competence and skills. Decision makers can use them to monitor and evaluate physicians’ performance. A high-quality consultation can be useful in social prescribing that helps patients to manage their disease.

Many patients feel anxious when entering the consultation room, but seldom verbalize their emotions explicitly in the medical encounter. The authors designed a study to analyse the visibility of patient pre‐consultation (state) anxiety in their communication during the consultation. In an attempt to learn more about how general practitioners' (GPs') communication can help patients to express their worries, the paper also aims to explore the relationship between physicians' communication and patients' articulation of concerns and worries during the consultation.

From a representative sample of videotaped consecutive consultations of 142 Dutch GPs with 2,095 adult patients, 1,388 patients (66.3 per cent) completed the pre‐consultation questionnaire, including state anxiety (STAI), subjective health (COOP‐WONCA‐charts) and the reason for encounter (ICPC). GPs assessed the psychosocial background of patients' presented problems on a five‐point Likert scale. The videotaped consultations were coded with RIAS, including global affect measures. GPs' patient‐directed gaze was measured as a time‐measure.

The results show that, on average, the patients had slightly elevated anxiety levels and one‐third of the patients were highly anxious. As expected, the anxious patients seldom expressed emotional concerns directly, but did show a nonverbal and verbal communication pattern which was distinctively different from that of non‐anxious patients. Whether or not patients expressed concerns verbally was significantly related to GPs' affective communication and partnership building. Nonverbal communication seemed to play a dominant role both in sending and receiving emotional signals

In more than half of the consultations worries were not openly expressed, even by patients with high levels of anxiety. Patients tended to express their concerns in a more indirect way, partly by verbal, partly by nonverbal signals. GPs can facilitate patients to express their concerns more openly, not by direct questioning, but by showing verbal and nonverbal affect to the patient.

Focuses on the important role of verbal and nonverbal affect in physicians' communication.

Measurements of the quality of physician‐patient communication are important in assessing patient outcomes, but the quality of communication is difficult to quantify. The aim of this paper is to develop a computer analysis system for the physician‐patient consultation process (CASC), which will use a quantitative method to quantify and analyze communication exchanges between physicians and patients during the consultation process.

CASC is based on the concept of narrative‐based medicine using a computer‐mediated communication (CMC) technique from a cognitive dialog processing system. Effective and ineffective consultation samples from the works of Saito and Kleinman were tested with CASC in order to establish the validity of CASC for use in clinical practice. After validity was confirmed, three researchers compared their assessments of consultation processes in a physician's office with CASCs. Consultations of 56 migraine patients were recorded with permission, and for this study consultations of 29 patients that included more than 50 words were used.

Transcribed data from the 29 consultations input into CASC resulted in two diagrams of concept structure and concept space to assess the quality of consultation. The concordance rate between the assessments by CASC and the researchers was 75 percent.

In this study, a computer‐based communication analysis system was established that efficiently quantifies the quality of the physician‐patient consultation process. The system is promising as an effective tool for evaluating the quality of physician‐patient communication in clinical and educational settings.

The main purpose of the paper was to examine whether a short patient training session on various ways of requesting physicians to clarify a piece of previously elicited information during medical consultation would improve information communication, thus increasing patient satisfaction.

A total of 114 adult patients voluntarily participated in the study which was carried out at a clinic in Canada. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to the experimental group and half to the control group. Males and females were evenly distributed in both experimental and control groups. Prior to their medical visits, participants in the experimental group received 10‐15‐minute face‐to‐face training, whereas the control group did not receive any training. The purpose of the training was to facilitate information transmission, with the intention to increase communication effectiveness and patient satisfaction. Immediately after their medical visits, all participants filled out a patient satisfaction questionnaire.

On all four dimensions of patient satisfaction (i.e. overall satisfaction, relationship satisfaction, communication satisfaction and expertise satisfaction), patients who received training scored significantly higher (were more satisfied) than patients who received no training. No consistent gender differences were found in patient satisfaction in both experimental and control groups.

This study applied a psycholinguistics theory, conversational grounding, to the field of patient education and achieved positive results.

The success of the short training session provides health practitioners with a new method to help patients communicate more effectively, thus increasing satisfaction in medical interviews.

Focuses on a means to elicit information from patients in medical consultations.

This study investigates the apparent methodological shortcomings of the current literature that considers patients’ evaluations of their care. In an effort to resolve the evident discrepancies between stated assertions and empirical evidence, integrates the two prominent streams of research to produce a more comprehensive model. Results suggest that just two distinct dimensions of the care experience were found to capture 74 per cent of the variance in satisfaction‐quality, with patients’ sociodemographic differences accounting for only 1 per cent.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate gender differences in work experiences, satisfactions and psychological health among physicians in Turkey.

Data were collected from 237 male and 194 female physicians using an anonymously completed questionnaire. Measures included personal demographic and work situation characteristics, stable individual difference factors (e.g. workaholism components, Type A behavior, optimism), job behaviors (e.g. perfectionism, hours worked), work and extra‐work satisfactions, indicators of work engagement, and psychological wellbeing.

There were few differences in personal demographic and work situation characteristics. Female physicians had less professional tenure and worked fewer hours and extra‐hours per week. Female and male physicians were similar on stable individual difference factors, job behaviors, work outcomes, extra‐work satisfactions and psychological wellbeing, with a few exceptions. Female physicians reported more work‐family conflict and more psychosomatic symptoms and tended to be absent more.

Data were collected using self‐report questionnaires raising the possibility of response set tendencies. It is also not clear to what extent these findings generalize to male and female physicians in other countries.

Despite previous studies showing considerable gender differences in the work experiences and wellbeing of female and male physicians in other countries, female and male physicians in Turkey reported generally similar job behaviors, satisfactions, quality of life and emotional wellbeing. This suggests that an emphasis on gender similarities rather than gender differences might be warranted.

The increase of life expectancy leads to the elderly living with one or more chronic illnesses. Communication between the elderly and the health-care professional is fundamental but can be difficult. For that reason, it is common to find the patient with an accompanying family member in the doctor’s surgery. The purpose of this paper is to analyze one of the possible actions of the companion during the provision of the medical service: the co-creation of value (through its two dimensions: coproduction and value-in-use) and its effects on the satisfaction of both the companion and the elderly patient.

A model has been tested through a system of structural equations using the statistical package EQS 6.2. The sample used is made up of 1,814 informants (907 companions and 907 patients).

The importance of coproduction between the accompanying person and the health-care professional is shown, to obtain greater levels of satisfaction (of the companion and the patient), whereas a negative role is conferred to the dimension value-in-use. This paper shows a positive impact of the satisfaction of the companion on that of the patient.

It is necessary to have health-care professionals who play a proactive role when facilitating the participation in the appointment with the doctor so as not to leave the initiative of participation in the hands of the companions.

Chronic illnesses are an important focal point of medical attention. Good management of the relations between those involved is fundamental for the diagnosis and adherence to treatment.