The impact of physicians’ communication skills on trust building in surgical patients: A crosssectional descriptive study

Trust-based communication is extremely important in the patient-physician relationship. The patient's trust in the physician is necessary for the success of the treatment. Due to the unknown, anxiety and fear in the field of surgery, patients want to be understood more by their physicians. The objective of the study is to determine the hospitalized surgical patients’ opinions about the communication skills of the physicians in building trust and the factors affecting them. 201 patients staying at the surgical unit constituted the sample of this cross-sectional descriptive study. The data collection form consisted of questions measuring demographic data and the Scale of Trust Communication in the Patient-Physician Relationship. Descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis, Bonferroni correction and Spearman correlation coefficient have been used to analyze the data. The Scale of Trust Communication in the Patient-Physician Relationship total point average was 86.15 ± 10.34. A meaningful relationship was found between the total score and trust in the physician health care attitude, trust in the physician decisions and the patient’s behavior regarding the payment status. The trust communication average score of the patients was high, and the total scale point average increased as the sub-scale averages increased.