USF St. Petersburg campus Faculty Publications
Physicians' tacit and stated policies for determining patient benefit and referral to cardiac rehabilitation.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2013
Abstract
Background/Purpose. The benefits of prescribing cardiac rehabilitation (CR) for patients following heart surgery is well documented; however, physicians continue to underuse CR programs, and disparities in the referral of women are common. Previous research into the causes of these problems has relied on self-report methods, which presume that physicians have insight into their referral behavior and can describe it accurately. In contrast, the research presented here used clinical judgment analysis (CJA) to discover the tacit judgment and referral policies of individual physicians. The specific aims were to determine 1) what these policies were, 2) the degree of self-insight that individual physicians had into their own policies, 3) the amount of agreement among physicians, and 4) the extent to which judgments were related to attitudes toward CR. Methods. Thirty-six Canadian physicians made judgments and decisions regarding 32 hypothetical cardiac patients, each described on 5 characteristics (gender, age, type of cardiovascular procedure, presence/ absence of musculoskeletal pain, and degree of motivation) and then completed the 19 items of the Attitude towards Cardiac Rehabilitation Referral scale. Results. Consistent with previous studies, there was wide variation among physicians in their tacit and stated judgment policies, and self-insight was modest. On the whole, physicians showed evidence of systematic gender bias as they judged women as less likely than men to benefit from CR. Insight data suggest that 1 in 3 physicians were unaware of their own bias. There was greater agreement among physicians in how they described their judgments (stated policies) than in how they actually made them (tacit policies). Correlations between attitude statements and CJA measures were modest. Conclusions. These findings offer some explanation for the slow progress of efforts to improve CR referrals and for gender disparities in referral rates.
Language
en_US
Publisher
Sage Publications
Recommended Citation
Beckstead, J.W., Pezzo, M.V., Beckie, T.M., Shahraki, F., Kentner, A.C. & Grace, S.L. (2014). Physicians' tacit and stated policies for determining patient benefit and referral to cardiac rehabilitation. Medical Decision Making, 34, 63-74 doi: 10.1177/0272989X13492017
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Comments
Abstract only. Full-text article is available only through licensed access provided by the publisher. Published in Medical Decision Making, 34, 63-74 doi: 10.1177/0272989X13492017. Members of the USF System may access the full-text of the article through the authenticated link provided.