The absent discourse of communication: understanding ethics of provider-patient relationship in six hospitals in urban India

Understanding the complexities of a provider-patient relationship is considered to be of critical importance especially in medical ethics. It is important to understand this relation from the perspectives of all stakeholders. This article derives from a qualitative study conducted across six obstetric care providing institutions in the cities of Mumbai and Navi Mumbai, India, over a period of 10 months. Thirty obstetricians were interviewed in-depth to understand what they perceived as the most important aspect in developing a good provider-patient relationship. The study found that while most providers highlighted the point of communication as the most critical part of the provider-patient relationship, they admitted that they could not engage in communication with the patients for various reasons. Obstetric consultants and residents said that they were too overburdened to spend time communicating with patients; providers working in public hospitals added that the lack of education of their patients posed a hindrance in effective communication. However, providers practicing in private institutions explained that they faced a challenge in communicating with patients because their patients came from educated families who tended to trust the provider less and were generally more critical of the provider’s clinical judgement. The article shows how provider-patient communication exists as an idea among medical providers but is absent in daily clinical practice. This gives rise to a discourse shaped around an absence. The authors conclude by decoding the term ‘communication’ – they read the word against the context of its use in the interviews, and argue that for the providers ‘communication’ was not intended to be a trope towards setting up a dialogue-based, egalitarian provider-patient relationship. Providers used the word in lieu of ‘counselling’, ‘guiding’, ‘talking to’. It concludes that, despite the providers’ insisting on the significance of communication and complaining about its absence, what they desired in reality was not the possibility of a dialogue with the patient or a chance to be able to share decision-making power with the patient, but to be able to provide better instructions and chart out what was best for them in a more detailed way.