Health Care Partners in Cancer Prevention & Care of Aged

描述（由申请人提供）：为了更好地了解影响老年人癌症预防和癌症护理的因素，我们提出了一项为期五年的纵向研究，以测试“医疗保健合作伙伴关系”（HCP）模式的医患健康沟通。我们不仅考虑医患沟通，还考虑消费者及其家人在健康信息收集和沟通中发挥的积极作用。我们研究了卫生保健合作伙伴之间的沟通如何影响使用有关结肠直肠癌，乳腺癌，前列腺癌和皮肤癌的预防措施。对于被诊断患有癌症的受访者，我们还探讨了与医生和护理人员的沟通如何影响生活质量。我们把健康传播的生态背景下（Kreps，2002年），考虑结构和个人的影响，医疗保健的伙伴关系。我们将进行四个年度面对面的访谈与两个代表性的社区样本的老年参与者在我们以前的研究（N=900）。电话访问将与我们的老年受访者的医生和非正式的医疗保健合作伙伴进行，以评估他们对癌症预防和护理的沟通取向。我们将使用自回归和潜在增长曲线结构方程模型（SEM）来评估我们的健康传播HCP模型中潜在的过渡和发展过程。除了使用这些定量方法来深入了解促进老年人癌症预防和护理的因素外，我们还建议对被诊断患有癌症的老年人及其HSO进行深入的定性访谈。通过使用这些多种方法，我们希望开发出可以为老年消费者，健康重要他人和医生提供信息的干预措施，以提高沟通技能，从而有利于患者护理和老年人的生活质量结果。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): To better understand factors influencing cancer prevention and cancer care among elderly persons; we propose a five-year longitudinal study to test a "Health Care Partnership" (HCP) model of doctor-patient health communication. We consider not only doctor-patient communication, but also proactive roles played by consumers and their family members in information gathering and communication concerning health. We examine how communication among health care partners influences use of preventive practices concerning colorectal, breast, prostate, and skin cancers. For respondents diagnosed with cancer, we also explore how communication with doctors and caregivers influences quality of life outcomes. We place health communication in an ecological context (Kreps, 2002) by considering structural and personal influences on health care partnerships. We will conduct four annual face-to-face interviews with two representative community samples of elderly participants in our prior research (N=900). Telephone interviews will be conducted with physicians and informal health care partners of our elderly respondents to assess their orientations to communication about cancer prevention and care. We will use both autoregressive and latent growth curve structural equation models (SEM) to assess potential transitory and developmental processes in our HCP model of health communication. In addition to using these quantitative approaches to gain insights about factors facilitating cancer prevention and care among the aged, we also propose in-depth qualitative interviews with older adults who have been diagnosed with cancer and with their HSOs. Through use of these multiple methods, we hope to develop insights that may inform interventions with elderly consumers, with health significant others, and with physicians to enhance communication skills that may benefit patient care and elderly persons' quality-of-life outcomes.