Researchers at Cooper University Health Care and Cooper Medical School of Rowan University recently received a two-year grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to study disparities in doctor-patient relationships. Specifically, the study will use a scale that the researchers previously developed and validated to measure patients’ experience of compassion from doctors during clinic visits, and test for disparities in compassion by patient race and ethnicity as well as patient socioeconomic status.
The AHRQ’s scientific review group gave the grant application an impact score of 10, which is a perfect score, and it placed the Cooper/CMSRU grant in the Top 1% of all research grant applications received.
“Compassion is foundational for high-quality health care. However, there is a paucity of research on disparities in compassionate care,” Dr. Stephen Trzeciak, chief of medicine at Cooper and professor and chair of medicine at CMSRU, said.
Trzeciak is principal investigator on the grant, with Dr. Brian Roberts, a physician-scientist in emergency medicine at Cooper and CMSRU, serving as study director.
“We will test the hypothesis that patients in certain populations, such as patients who are Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, or have low socioeconomic status independent of race or ethnicity, may be experiencing less compassion from clinicians compared to other patients, and we will test how this is associated with patient trust of the health care system,” Trzeciak said.
The overarching hypothesis of this line of research is that lower compassion from clinicians is associated with lower patient trust of the health care system, and higher risk of being lost to follow-up (i.e., not coming back for further care), which can be harmful to patients. The research will enroll 350 adult patients in doctors’ offices in urban, suburban and rural practices to capture a wide range of diverse patients from different settings.
“Prior research supports that patients in populations where we observe health disparities may experience low-quality relationships with physicians and other clinicians. This study will further test that premise, while also identifying specific clinician behaviors that communicate compassion (or lack of) from the patient perspective” Roberts said.
Trzeciak and Roberts are among the leading researchers in the field of compassion science. Compassion has always been considered a vital aspect of the “art of medicine,” but emerging research has shown that compassion also has measurable beneficial effects belonging in the “science of medicine.”
