Demographics can provide useful clues for predicting patients’ general healthcare preferences, according to a U.K. study involving thousands of older adults.
Age, sex, and education could all be useful starting points for decision making in a busy clinic environment, helping to improve patient satisfaction and health outcomes.
Researchers found that men and women differed in their priorities for life, attitudes to risk, and whether they preferred to make treatment decisions themselves.
Age also had an impact on the willingness to take risks and how open patients were to taking part in experimental treatments, they reported in PLOS One.
Nonetheless, the team admits that the findings cannot replace asking patients individually about this.
“While age, sex, and education can offer useful clues about healthcare preferences, every patient’s wishes remain unique,” acknowledged researcher Nicholas Steel, PhD, from the University of East Anglia.
“Understanding those preferences more quickly could improve both patient satisfaction and health outcomes.
“This work provides a valuable starting point for more personalized care as Britain’s population continues to age and healthcare decisions become increasingly complex.”
The findings come from answers from 6098 adults aged 50 years and over who took part in a nationally representative biennial survey in England.
Six measures of general healthcare preferences were assessed among these participants of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing: risk aversion; future orientation; quality or length of life; body function compared to looks; openness to experimental treatments; and preference to leave treatment decisions to a doctor.
Results showed that women were significantly more likely than men to prioritize quality of life over length of life and less likely to want doctors to make healthcare decisions on their behalf. They were also more cautious about risks and less willing to try experimental treatments.
Men were more likely to hand over decision-making to medical professionals and were less likely to put quality of life ahead of simply living longer.
People aged 75 and over were more likely to avoid risks and experimental treatments and more likely to leave healthcare decisions to their doctor than those in their 50s and early 60s.
In addition, older individuals were more likely to prioritize how well their body functions rather than how it looks.
“The finding that stood out to me the most was around education—people who had fewer educational opportunities were more likely to leave treatment decisions to their doctors,” said researcher Oby Enwo, MD, also from the University of East Anglia.
“To me, this highlights the need to explore how we can ensure shared decision-making reaches everyone equally.”
Overall, the researchers say their findings have important implications for clinical practice.
“Whilst healthcare preferences vary between individuals and cannot be assumed to hold across demographic groups, there are some general preference traits by age and sex and education that may be useful to clinicians seeking to elicit patients’ preferences within the constraints of a short consultation,” they reported in the journal.
“Shared decision-making tools such as decision aids can facilitate patient-provider conversations that reveal individual preferences, particularly where patients may have distinct perspectives on treatment risks, benefits, and autonomy.”
