Qualitative Research Understanding Patients Needs and Experiences 英文参考文献.docVIP

Editorial Qualitative Research: Understanding Patients’ Needs and Experiences The PLoS Medicine Editors W hy do up to half of all patients with tuberculosis (TB) fail to adhere to drug treatment [1]? Such investigation has led to [9], or how patients experience the trial process itself. They can even be used to re?ne or improve a clinical trial in “real time.” In a trial of a extraordinary biomedical advances— yet patients often fail to reap the bene?ts because health professionals may not understand how best to deliver them in the context of patients’ multifaceted lives. The academic editor of Salla Munro and colleagues’ study commented that thinking of TB drugs simply as a “biomedical intervention” without factoring in patients’ needs and broader social contexts creates circumstances that increase the likelihood of poor adherence to treatment. Qualitative research is the best way to understand these needs and contexts. Astrid Fletcher and colleagues, for example, used quantitative methods to objectively determine who (in terms of age, sex, and education level) did not use the eye-care services available in India [7]. But they adopted a qualitative approach to answer the question of why people did not use these services. David Leon and colleagues, during a quantitative study on hazardous alcohol drinking in Russia, learned that much alcohol was consumed in the form of what were described as “surrogates” [8]. Qualitative research helped to identify what these surrogates were—they included eau de Cologne and over-the- counter medications. When researchers investigate the experiences of people receiving or failing to receive health care, identify themes in these subjective stories, and integrate these themes into the greater context of human life experience, the results are informative to care providers. The usefulness of these results lies precisely in their subjectivity: the subjects are telling us, or we are ?nding out through more subtle observation, what matte