Exploring patient centered communication on health outcomes: Role of trust and online information seeking in Turkish cancer patients receiving chemotherapy

Patient-centered communication (PCC) is an important concept at the core of patient-centered care. PCC can help physicians understand patients’ needs, provide adequate information to patients, and establish trust between patients and physicians, thus promoting satisfaction with information received and perceived quality of life. This study aimed to examine the mediating role of trust in physicians in the relationship between satisfaction with information received through PCC and perceived quality of life in patients receiving chemotherapy, and the moderating role of online cancer information seeking behavior in the relationship between these variables. This study, designed as a cross-sectional design from quantitative research methods, included 467 participants who had received at least four chemotherapy treatments at the Department of Oncology, Faculty of Medicine, Sakarya University. Convenience sampling method was used. Data were collected using a face-to-face survey technique in the chemotherapy healthcare waiting area under the supervision and permission of a physician. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and structural equation modeling. The results showed that the relationship between PCC and perceived quality of life was insignificant, and satisfaction with information received through PCC was low in the cancer information seeking group and moderately correlated in the non-seeking group. Additionally, trust in physician mediated the relationship between PCC and quality of life in both groups. Trust in physician mediated the relationship between PCC and satisfaction with information received in the cancer information seeking group, but this effect was found to be insignificant in the other group. Moreover, the proposed model explained 5% of the variance in quality of life and 43% of the variance in satisfaction with information received in the cancer information seeking group. In the other group, the proposed model explained 7% of the variance in quality of life and 26% of the variance in satisfaction with information received. Our findings indicate that effective patient-centered care initiatives in cancer care settings yield beneficial outcomes for patients and online information-seeking behavior contributes to these positive results. Therefore, improving the applicability and reliability of online health information and developing patient-doctor interaction and patient-doctor trust could beneficial for practitioners and researchers in the field.