Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since May 17, 2024)
Date Submitted: Jul 10, 2023
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Assessing Internet's potential value in repairing public-physician trust: A cross-sectional study during COVID-19 from China
ABSTRACT
Background:
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet has accelerated in popularity in China, especially among the middle-aged and elderly groups. At the same time, physicians' contributions were substantially mentioned and reported during the COVID-19 pandemic, but can the Internet enhance public trust in physicians? Exploring this question is important to alleviate the increasingly tense physician-patient relationship and reduce violent attacks on physicians, but no studies have explored this issue.
Objective:
The frequent violent assaults in China against physicians reflect the lack of public trust in physicians. Based on a cross-sectional data at the nationwide level in mainland China during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study explored the relationship between internet use and public trust in physicians, and its underlying mechanisms.
Methods:
This study used data from the China Family Panel Studies of wave 2020, which involved 11,554 middle-aged and elder adults aged 45 and above. The relationship between internet use and public trust in physicians was tested empirically by constructing the OLS model, and further examine the mediating role of life satisfaction and the moderating role of perceived quality of healthcare with the help of macro PROCESS4.0 tool.
Results:
Internet use and public trust in physicians were significantly negatively associated, and this association was significant in the male sample and the urban sample. The full mediating role of life satisfaction in the negative effect of internet use on public trust in physicians was 39.66%. Perceived quality of healthcare positively moderated the association between internet use and public trust in physicians, which implies that this relationship is stronger in publics with high perceived quality of healthcare than in those with low perceived quality of healthcare.
Conclusions:
The Internet is an important tool for repairing public-physician trust, and the abundance of negative news in the Internet is key to eroding public-physician trust. Improving the public's life satisfaction and medical experience can help repair public-doctor trust indirectly, thus reducing the incidence of violent attacks against doctors.
Citation
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Copyright
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