Scientific Merit Paper
This paper will analyze Doekhie and coworkers’ 2018 research work titled “The different perspectives of patients, informal caregivers, and professionals on patient involvement in primary care teams. A qualitative study”. This analysis will entail an evaluation of how the research work contributes to scientific knowledge and research theory, its dependability and credibility, approaches to deal with any ethical concerns relating to the research, and how the researchers applied different techniques of inquiry.

Advancement of the scientific knowledge base

The research work adds to the literature on the subject through examining the issue of patient participation in the health-related decision?making process in the course of primary care team interactions with patients and their informal caregivers within the primary patient care setting. Here, patient participation is no explicitly established idea; instead, the concept is coproduced using interactions and discussions of primary patient care practitioners, reciprocally, with patients and their informal (or family) caregivers. This renders it essential to concentrate on patient participation as members of primary care units (Swan et al., 2012). Generation of theories which can explain, with certainty, phenomena generalizing beyond the specific is a long- term scientific objective. Science produces cumulative knowledge through developing, refining, and even sometimes replacing theories.

This study by Doekhie and colleagues (2018) will add significant value to healthcare practice as well as the relevant knowledge pool. It offers salient details on public health initiatives and measures, care patterns, and healthcare implementation from the point of view of a few of the sector’s key stakeholders, namely, practitioners, patients, and informal caregivers. Hence, this research work aids mutual understanding and offers vital details on the negative impacts and effectiveness of clinical initiatives through controlling variables having the potential to affect research outcomes. Furthermore, the research affords a chance for feedback thanks to the actual clinical experience of these entities, which proves critical to the comparison and improvement of medication, medical device, diagnostics, and vaccine usage. Lastly, it is imperative to document and evaluate clinical practice experiences for developing best practice guidelines and guaranteeing superior quality healthcare delivery for patients.

Health sector policies in industrialized nations like America should be in line with the national value system as well as fundamental facts about healthcare and societal health. It may be a tricky task to attain such compatibility because individual value-linked differences might crop up in policy discussions. Hence, such studies prove essential, since they offer evidence-based facts that may be applied in order for establishing a framework to structure the national healthcare discussion. In the end, the defining issues aren’t, for instance, whether or not high deductible healthcare plans have the desired impact, what prescription medication benefit plans ought to cover, or why it is recommended to rely on health maintenance institutions (Brook & Vaiana, 2015). Instead, the main issue is how to reform the healthcare system and attain ideal results in accordance with stakeholder views.

The study involves a logical, orderly, and methodical set of procedures, raising readers’ level of thought, and reinforcing ideas through a critique and reflection of techniques already employed in the field of healthcare, by presenting the views of healthcare consumers (i.e., patients) and their informal caregivers that, despite their significance, are typically neglected. The study furthers knowledge on the subject, and more significantly, creates room for the formulation of novel hypotheses and strategies to improve healthcare delivery techniques and approaches through ensuring the engagement of all stakeholders. The study primarily serves to pose new questions and generate new knowledge. Moreover, it aids future practice and developments.

The research constitutes an instrument for facilitating learning and knowledge building. To be more specific, it aids in building healthcare knowledge and, particularly, patient caregiving knowledge, through asserting that patient participation occurs within complex interactions of patients and their informal caregivers with diverse healthcare providers; the expectations and views of involved parties may be incompatible with one another in such an instance (Young, 2015). Acknowledging patient and informal caregiver contributions to primary patient care teams can enable healthcare practitioners to understand them and their needs better, thereby reducing the possibility of challenges cropping up during team interactions.

Contribution to research theory

Researchers, while discussing the research function, suggest a close link between research and theory. To put it more clearly, the original motivation underlying research is a quest for theory. The formulation of theories is dependent on research, which, in turn, and reciprocally, is dependent on theories. Hence, this linkage is of a dialectic nature, a transaction by which theories help decide what information to gather, with research findings challenging accepted theories. Thus, this study has a pivotal part to play in adding to the theory revolving around patient participation in decision- making during interactions in the primary care setting.

This study contributes significantly to theoretical advancement, particularly concerning patient engagement in care-related decision making. With time, patient care transformed from being solely the role of practitioners with no or scant patient, family, and informal caregiver input (Eccles et al., 2005). As studies are done where the need arises to understand something or gain new information on a topic, the need for determining patient engagement effects resulted in this study. Scientific research aims at improving insights, a goal achieved by adding to the existing information pool, and testing theories. Research efforts help generate the necessary knowledge and data for decision- making and issue resolution. These efforts may be segregated into applied and basic/ pure research for distinguishing between research performed for furthering knowledge and research attempting at applying existing knowledge to actual, practical challenges. This study is a form of applied research in the field of healthcare for facilitating provider problem-solving and decision-making.

The integrated healthcare provision theory maintains that patients ought to be involved in decision-making. Patient engagement in healthcare/ therapeutic decision making is no new concept; however, in the present time, it has grown into a political prerequisite in several nations and healthcare systems worldwide (Eccles et al., 2005; Vahdat et al., 2014). The research work is salient owing to its...…research study, participants’ and researchers’ interactions throughout the study pose ethical challenges for the researcher. The researcher is involved at various points in the study, and this makes it necessary to formulate strategies to address such ethical concerns. In this study, there was no existing personal relationship between the researchers and the participants. Some of the healthcare professionals had been introduced to some of the researchers in professional settings. Therefore, the risk of their being ethical concerns because of such familiarity is low. The introductions had been made during academic conferences, and a few were introduced to the researcher by a colleague explicitly for this study (Doekhie et al., 2018). The project made the participants aware that the information required of them was for a Ph.D. project of the researcher and that the researcher was a Ph.D. student at Erasmus University.

Further, the project clearly defined the goal of the research to the participants. The researchers stated that the goal was to get their perspectives on what patient involvement means to them. Moreover, another goal was how their opinion of such involvement had informed their interactions with healthcare professionals, informal caregivers, and patients.

Qualitative research methods are used to provide explanations and elaborations on various facets of the human experience. As such, since researchers take part in human activities, and they have a first-hand base of references to draw from, readers can trust their interpretations of qualitative data to be accurate. In this instance, the ‘no harm’ principle applies and the researchers should be wary of any kind of harm that may be inflicted on the participants (Sanjari et al., 2014). One of the ways participants may be harmed in a study like this is when sensitive information such as personal medical information gets leaked or mishandled. The study has taken steps to protect participants from such risk. The identity of the participants is protected, and the researchers have ensured that all information provided remains confidential. Further, the researchers took caution to get written consent from the participants in the study (Doekhie et al., 2018).

Qualitative employ narratives and multi-pronged interviews to get an account of experiences. This research study employed such tools, and the exercise posed an ethical challenge because of the likelihood of misrepresenting the information provided by the participants, given the subjectivity of qualitative data. This ethical concern can be addressed by the researcher keenly noting the feelings of the participants as well as how the participants interpret the comments or questions of the researcher. This study maintained an overt data collection process and provided a complete record of findings. Because confidentiality cannot be guaranteed in absolute terms in a scenario where complete written records are made of the information provided by the participants, consent is essential. Keeping a written record also helps participants decide what they want to be recorded. The authors stored the written records on the computer of the first author (KD) as per the rules and regulations guiding data management at Erasmus University Rotterdam…