부산대학교 도서관

Summary: Background: Research has demonstrated that healthcare professionals are not immune to weight stigma attitudes, with evidence showing that people living with overweight or obesity may experience direct and indirect stigma and discrimination. This can impact the quality of care provided and impact patients' engagement in healthcare. Despite this, there is a paucity of research examining patient attitudes towards healthcare professionals living with overweight or obesity, which can also hold implications for the patient–practitioner relationship. Thus, this study examined whether healthcare professionals’ weight status impacts patient satisfaction and recalled advice. Methods: In this prospective cohort study, using an experimental design, 237 participants (113 women, 125 men) aged 32 ± 8.92 with a body mass index of 25.87 ± 6.79 kg m2 were recruited through a participant pooling service (ProlificTM), word of mouth, and social media. The majority of participants were from the UK: 119, followed by participants from the USA: 65, Czechia: 16, Canada: 11, and other countries (N = 26). Participants completed an online experiment consisting of questionnaires assessing satisfaction with healthcare professionals and recalled advice after exposure to one of eight conditions assessing the impact of healthcare professional weight status (lower weight or obesity), gender (woman or man) and profession (psychologist or dietitian). A novel approach to creating the stimuli was used to exposure participants to healthcare professionals of different weight status. All of the participants responded to the experiment hosted on Qualtrics™ in the period from June 8, 2016 to July 5, 2017. Study hypotheses were examined using linear regression with dummy variables and follow up post-hoc analysis to estimate marginal means with adjustment for planned comparisons. Findings: The only statistically significant result was a difference with a small effect in patient satisfaction, where satisfaction was significantly higher in healthcare professional who was a women living with obesity compared to healthcare professional who was a man living with obesity (estimate = −0.30; SE = 0.08; df = 229; ωₚ2 = 0.05; CI = −0.49 to −0.11; p