Support Person Holding Back Information in Medical Interactions: The Role of Empathic Communication and Disclosure Efficacy

Support people are often both physically and emotionally involved in patients' cancer-care trajectories with first-hand knowledge of the patient's health; they also harbor their own fears and concerns. When present in the medical interaction, support people report hesitancy to share patient information and concerns with clinicians, although they deem this information is important for patient care. Framed in the disclosure decision-making model, this study examines how support people's perceptions of clinician empathic communication affect their disclosure efficacy, and how these concepts relate to outcomes of holding back information about patient health or their own fears and concerns. Participants included support people (<i>N</i> = 129) recruited from the Love Research Army® who completed an online survey. Analyses investigated how disclosure efficacy influences the association between perceived clinician empathic communication and support person holding back patient health information (model 1) and support person holding back their own fears and concerns (model 2). Overall, results identify differences in support people's holding back when making disclosure decisions related to patients' physical health versus their own fears and concerns. Greater disclosure efficacy shaped the relationship between perceived clinician empathic communication and lower levels of holding back patient health information, bolstering the importance of clinician empathic communication with support people of cancer patients.