Social and Psychological Aspects of Trust in Medical Patients
The issue of patients' trust in doctors has become highly relevant, for there is an urgent need for reliable specialists who are well versed in psychology of human relationships and can build patient-doctor relationships based on trust. The relevance of the research consists in the fact that nowadays there are few specialists meeting this requirement and the issue of patient-doctor trust is largely underinvestigated by Russian psychologists.The article analyzes the existing approaches to the notion of trust focusing on the psychological aspect of this phenomenon. The article underlines that scholars' understanding of the concept of trust has changed several times. The article analyzes theoretical aspects of trust and investigates the concept of trust as represented in works of different scholars (A. Seligmen, A. B. Kupreychenko, T. P. Skripkina, etc.).The empirical part of the research focuses on the content of the phenomenon of trust, i.e. on the content of patients' trust in their doctors. The research is conducted in the Department of Surgery, the Department of Trauma and the Department of Therapeutics of the City Clinical Hospital (Ryazan) and in the Department of Pulmonology of the Regional Clinical Hospital (Ryazan). The research involves 50 respondents: 25 surgical patients and 25 non-surgical patients. The communication with patients is voluntary (as required by the code of ethics), anonymous, and confidential. The respondents are asked to answer a number of questions both orally and in writing. The main method of investigating patients' trust in doctors is an interview.The research shows that there are four basic factors that predetermine patients' trust in their doctors: doctors' professional qualities, communication skills, moral and ethical principles, self-regulation. The research has uncovered no differences in surgical patients' and non-surgical patients' trust in doctors, which may be beneficial for further research, since there will be no need to trace differences in different groups of patients.