Analysing the doctor–patient relationship risk from the evolution of the relationship: observe the past to foresee the future

Jiangjie Sun, Minhui Wen, Jiayi Shao, Liping Zhang

Doctor–patient relationship risk hinders the healthy development of health care, and its continued deterioration seriously affects the government’s credibility. Taking history as a reference, analyzing and exploring the evolution of the doctor–patient relationship in healthcare development can reveal the causative factors of doctor–patient relationship risk. This research proposed the evolutionary trajectory of “formation-development-derivation” of the doctor-patient relationship since 5000 BC. By analyzing the whole process of the evolution of the doctor–patient relationship, the study identifies a characteristics and logic of the escalation of doctor–patient relationship conflict, which is “a kind of trust—a super trust—…—an urgent need to reconstruct trust”. This research explored the risk factor behind the manifestation from original to contemporary to the modern in doctor–patient relationship. The “uncertainty of stakeholders in the whole process of diagnosis and treatment” is the root cause of the risk of the doctor-patient relationship. Based on this, three insights are proposed for controlling the risk of the doctor–patient relationship: strengthening service awareness, finding reliability in ambiguity, and clarifying the direction of diagnostic and treatment activities; enhancing subject capacity, retrieving certainty in uncertainty, and improving the trust between doctors and patients; and consolidating collaborative efforts, extracting concise features from complexity, and effectively managing risks.