Ricerc@Sapienza

Research has ascertained the effect of informal support networks on health. Social support by healthcare providers has been investigated, but each study has made different choices concerning the measurement of this construct. Moreover, there is an overlap of concepts in the study of social support from the perspective of healthcare organizations. This overlap makes not possible to disentangle social support functions from interpersonal skills, communication ability, trust in the healthcare organizations, and so forth. To evaluate how healthcare support may impact health outcomes, reliable and valid instruments are needed to capture separate but related aspects of the construct. Inspired by psychosocial models of social support, the primary aim of this proposal is to develop the Health Provider Social Support scale (HPSS) to complement existing measures of quality of healthcare with an instrument aligned to psychological research. Second, we aim to examine how patients' personality and contextual factors moderate the relations of social support functions with the quality of healthcare and quality of life. To attain these goals we develop the HPSS on a sample of patients affected by chronic conditions. We will examine the relationships of the HPSS with variables that affect the perception of social support and its impact on the perceived quality of staff communication, the perceived technical competence of the healthcare provider, and with confidence and trust in the healthcare team. Because chronic diseases are a primary source of stress, we examine if healthcare social support might help to defuse patient anxiety and worries. We also examine the role of attachment in the relations of social support with the perceived health-care quality and health distress. The study will involve collecting information on the sense of belonging to a community of care, studying the difference in perceived social support from patients in religious and government-operated hospitals.