Conceptualizing negotiation in the clinical encounter – A scoping review using principles from critical interpretive synthesis

Objective
Negotiation as an analytical concept in research about clinical encounters is vague. We aim to provide a conceptual synthesis of key characteristics of the process of negotiation in clinical encounters based on a scoping review.

Methods
We conducted a scoping review of relevant literature in Embase, Psych Info, Global Health and SCOPUS. We included 25 studies from 1737 citations reviewed.

Results
We found that the process of negotiation is socially situated depending on the individual patient and professional, a dynamic element of the interaction that may occur both tacitly and explicitly at all stages of the encounter and is not necessarily tied to a specific health problem. Hence, negotiation is complex and influenced by both social, biomedical, and temporal contexts.

Conclusions
We found that negotiation between patient and health professional occurs at all stages of the clinical encounter. Negotiation is influenced by social, temporal, and biomedical contexts that encompass the social meeting between patient and health professional.

We suggest that health professionals strive to be attentive to patients’ tacit negotiation practices. This will strengthen the recognition of the patients’ actual wishes for their course of treatment which can thus guide the health professionals’ recommendations and treatment.