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Reconsidering the pseudo-patient study.
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Herrera, Chris |
| Copyright Year | 2001 |
| Abstract | In pseudo-patient study (PPS), fieldworkers cloak their identities and intentions and pose as “patients.” This enables them to observe the practice of healthcare from within a naturalistic, nonreactive research setting. Rosenhan and his assistants conducted the most famous PPS, where they faked symptoms of schizophrenia so that they could gain admittance to a mental-health facility and observe the treatment that genuine patients were receiving.1 More subtle pseudo-patients might arrange “appointments” over the phone, after reporting varying levels of health insurance.2 Others might provide dummy lab specimens or test a physician’s response to technical questions. A few genuine patients have transformed their legitimate stays in the hospital into fieldwork, transforming themselves into disguised participant-observers.3 For a number of reasons, however, the PPS remains on the fringes of the literature on human-subject research, often regarded as a curious hybrid of social science and medicine. On one hand, this is somewhat surprising, given the growing popularity of fieldwork approaches in medicine.4 On the other hand, not the least of the drawbacks to the PPS is that the healthcare workers become unwitting subjects, swept up in studies that they may know nothing about and that may run counter to their interests. To readers accustomed to thinking in terms of nonmaleficence and autonomy, the PPS may appear to commit bioethics sacrilege: To succeed, the PPS has to deliberately ignore informed consent in the clinical setting, where strict prohibitions against deception and involuntary participation in research are the norm. Still, one can make a qualified case for the PPS, and conventional wisdom in research ethics actually offers insight developing that case. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://static.cambridge.org/resource/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20170215032413491-0749:S0963180101213127:S0963180101003127a.pdf |
| PubMed reference number | 11414187v1 |
| Volume Number | 10 |
| Issue Number | 3 |
| Journal | Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics : CQ : the international journal of healthcare ethics committees |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Bioethics Consent Forms Deception Health care facility Patients Pseudo brand of pseudoephedrine Schizophrenia Sense of identity (observable entity) Social Sciences Specimen |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
