Dealing with questions of meaning in the medical care of chronically somatically ill patients

Background to the study

People with chronic physical illnesses repeatedly have questions about meaning and suffer from a lack of meaning. This becomes clear, for example, in a study by Dezutter and colleagues (2013), who were able to show that a considerable proportion of the chronically ill people surveyed had difficulties experiencing meaning in life: they were either stuck in an unsuccessful search for meaning or did not try to search for it at all. At the same time, reviews and meta-analyses show that experiencing meaning is an outcome-relevant factor in psychotherapeutic and medical healthcare:

"Overall, higher levels of meaning are clearly associated with better physical health, as well as with behavioural factors that decrease the probability of negative health outcomes or increase that of positive health outcomes." (Roepke et al., 2014).

In addition, many doctors often seem to feel overwhelmed and/or insufficiently trained with questions of meaning or spiritual concerns, so that they are therefore unable to respond to the needs of their patients or are unable to recognise them at all. This is all the more significant as doctors, due to their authority, have a key role to play in their role as a trusted person and first contact person, which they can use to provide patients with the best possible support in the process of finding meaning and thus also recovery and/or to provide support.

Aims of the study
Against this background, the aim of this project is to qualitatively investigate how doctors working in private practice and inpatient care (internal medicine/cardiology, orthopaedics, neurology) deal with questions of meaning as part of their treatment of chronically ill patients. To date, there have been hardly any national or international studies on how doctors experience and organise dealing with questions of meaning during their patient treatment and what effects working with questions of meaning has on them and their patients.

Expected benefits of the study
In addition to closing the above-mentioned research gap, the results of the present study would be a first step towards potentially improving medical care for patients with chronic physical illnesses who have questions about meaning. This can be done by developing practical recommendations for everyday medical practice, for medical studies and for the training and further education of doctors.