Lecture 3

Question 1

Palliative care

Answer 1

Caring for someone with a serious, chronic illness, who is dying. The kind of care really depends on:
- Access to good care
- Assessment and treatment
- Adequate information
- Adequate emotional support
- Discrimination can cause people to receive inadequate palliative care

Question 2

The dual-needs model of communication

Answer 2

People have 2 basic needs in medical consultation:
1. Need to know: cognitive need for information.
2. Need to feel known: affective need to be seen as a person behind the illness.

A lot of complaints about medical care are about a lack of communication. This can be due to intercultural differences. The need to know, for example, is NOT universally shared with everyone. There are also differences in cultures between the implicit and explicit communication (“go home and come back when you are better”)

Question 3

High explicitness

Answer 3

Is often better received, because people know what to expect (also in non-Western cultures).

Question 4

Low expicitness

Answer 4

Causes less satisfaction, less self-efficacy and more uncertainty.

Question 5

Legal aspects

Answer 5

In the Netherlands, the doctor has the duty to inform a patient as clear as possible, but the patient has the right not to know.

Question 6

Clinical applications

Answer 6

• Keep culture into consideration (ask the family about preferences).
• Be careful with prognosis: religion and miracles can happen.
• Hope for the best, but plan for the rest.

Question 7

Empathy

Answer 7

Putting yourself in someone elses shoes. In clinical practice, this is more the action component: not only seeing someone suffering, but talking/doing something about it (compassion).

Question 8

Is empathy always a good thing?

Answer 8

No, because:
- It is biased: by skin color, relatedness etc.
- We only feel it for the one and not for the group (like with climate change).
- It can be used to weaponise people (like in politics).
- People form minority groups receive less empathy.
- People with lower SES experience lower empathy.

Question 9

Experiment of verbal empathy

Answer 9

• If there was NO empathy, then NON-WESTERN people were WORSE off than Western people.
• If there WAS empathy, NON-WESTERN people were BETTER off than Western people.

They benefit the most form the empathy, because they need it the most! (because they are now worse off than western people)

Question 10

SES and individualism

Answer 10

• In periods of economic growth, there is a growing rate of independence.
• In periods of economic recession, there is a growing rate of interdependence.