4839.0.55.001 - Health Services: Patient Experiences in Australia, 2009  
ARCHIVED ISSUE Released at 11:30 AM (CANBERRA TIME) 20/10/2011   
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Contents >> Communication with health providers >> Communication with health providers

COMMUNICATION WITH HEALTH PROVIDERS

This chapter explores in more detail people's experiences with communication around prescriptions for medication, pathology and imaging tests, and seeing three or more health professionals for a single condition.

For the most part, rates of receiving and completely understanding explanations were high (around 85% or greater) and did not significantly differ between categories for each characteristic. For example, there was no particular difference for people with and without private health insurance, or from areas of greater or lesser disadvantage, or even with differing levels of education in rates of receiving and understanding information about the health service they were using.

Where people were seeing multiple heath professionals for a single condition, rates of reporting issues caused by a lack of communication between these health professionals were also steady across categories for most characteristics, at around 10%.

Where people had asked a pharmacist for health-related advice, the greater proportion found that advice completely met their needs. This was similarly unaffected by the range of population characteristics noted above.







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