P-9　Comparison between General People and Health Professionals on Qualitative Risk of Medical Practices

Abstract

Medical practices have brought many benefits to the health and vigor of human beings. However, differences in the assumed risks by general people and health professionals can interfere with constructive relationships in the clinical setting. Therefore, it is important to understand what kind of risks that they imagine. We examined the differences in the conceived risks between medical experts (doctors, nurses, and pharmacists) and lay people who did not work as medical health professionals, using a questionnaire. We surveyed 677 Japanese adults recruited via the Internet, and targeted 17 relatively well-known medical practices (e.g., protective vaccination, blood transfusion, and X-ray test). After asking whether the participants had heard of the medical practices (awareness exceeded 70%), they wrote about the risks inherent within each medical practice via free description. The lay people were less likely to consider medical practices as “dangerous” as compared to the medical experts' groups, fewer lay people were able to assess the risk involved in the medical practices correctly, more report absolutely than other groups, and more lay people tended to express doubt regarding the medical practices. Among the experts' groups, differences were observed among doctors, nurses, and pharmacists in terms of their answer patterns, correctness of the perceived risk, concreteness of the perceived risk, and detailed classification of the same.