Patients, doctors should be more open

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A doctors' seminar concluded Saturday with a call for both doctors and patients to do more to improve the diagnosis and treatment of disease.

"The relationship between doctors and patients must be based on trust," Tini Hadad, a member of the Indonesian Council for Doctors, told the seminar organized by the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Indonesia.

Tini said doctors had to respect patients, while patients had to be up front and honest about their conditions with doctors.

She said patients would only be able to trust doctors if they gave patients proper medical care and respected them as human beings in need of help.

"Unfortunately, most of the time the relationship becomes imbalanced since patients know nothing about their disease and the medical processes they should go through... That's what makes patients act passively," she said.

"On the other hand, doctors are unwilling and too impatient to ask further about their patients' conditions since they lack the time," she added.

Agus Purwadianto, who chairs the Legal and Organizational Bureau at the Ministry of Health, admitted that doctors often had difficulty bridging the knowledge gap with their patients and effectively communicating with them.

"Doctors in Indonesia lack the social education that would help them communicate better with patients," he said. "So far, doctors in Indonesia have been taught that patients are only bodies, even though they consist of a body and a spirit."

He said the government had tried to improve the quality of the universities' medical curricula to teach doctors communication skills such as using uncomplicated words that could be easily understood by their patients.

Asked by a seminar participant why two doctors could give different diagnoses of the same patient, Agus said that the time of the examination and the methodology used by each doctor could influence their different analyses.

He said that, as an example, a patient could visit one doctor while his or her condition was still not serious. "But, when he goes to another doctor, his condition has already worsened... That's what makes the two doctors give different diagnoses (to the same) patient," Agus said.

Tini, however, said that doctors were not the only people responsible for delivering quality medical treatment. "There are many factors affecting the quality of medical services, such as the medicine taken by the patients and support personnel such as nurses," she said.

"But since doctors are the ones that diagnose a disease and give medical treatment to patients, full responsibility therefore lies in their hands," she said.

Budi Sampurna, another speaker at the seminar, said people putting all the blame on medical personnel should view healthcare as a whole system.

"Sometimes doctors must take risks when treating a patient. So incorrect treatments are not always the result of mistakes," he said.

A member of the Indonesian Hospital Association, M. Natsir Nugroho, said recent news of malpractice cases had a negative impact on doctors.

"Doctors are afraid of making any decisions about their patients without approval from the patients' family, even though they need to make a snap decision at the time," he said.