Table 3.
Results Q3: How do these interactions impact blind patients’ overall functioning and health?
| Theme | n | FG | Quote |
|---|---|---|---|
| Other | |||
| Refusal of services | 7 | 4 | “We actually had a really big issue about that and they almost wouldn’t let me do it [get hormone replacement therapy] because of the injections thing. And … I was like, ‘Yeah, I know I can stab myself in the leg with the needle.’“ - Mel, FG 5 |
| Respect | |||
| Consequences of feeling disrespected | 23 | 7 | “I’ve been through four primary cares because they don’t care. They don’t want to hear you, they don’t listen. They just yell at you for your numbers that might be too higher or too lower or whatever.” - Barbra, FG 4 |
| Requesting independence/respectful treatment | 2 | 2 | “People wanna be independent.” - Kevin, FG 1 |
| HCP respects patient | 31 | 7 | “Whenever she [HCP] has a question about blindness it’s something like, ‘What is the best way to do this for you?’ And then, whatever I tell her is the best way to do it for me, she does it after that. So she’s always been really amazing and I can tell that she’s pushing her staff who interact with me to respond similarly because since I’ve started seeing her instead of seeing the guy who does my procedures, the staff’s care has improved as well.” - Jessica, FG 3 |
| Regarding family planning | 1 | 1 | “[The medical resident conducting the exam] said, ‘…We know that you’re not planning on getting pregnant right now, but if you decide…that you want to start a family, we have a really good prenatal clinic here and we can put you on multi-vitamins … we can hook you up with an OBGYN.’ … Even though I wasn’t planning on getting pregnant, I thought it was really cool that she didn’t assume that because I was blind that I couldn’t be a parent. And she just, like, probably said the same thing to me that she says to other 30-year-old female patients who come in. And I just thought that was cool.” - Annie, FG 3 |
Notes. n = number of participants who made at least one response in accordance with a given theme. FG = the number of focus groups where the given theme was mentioned at least once.
1.
An additional noteworthy point is that the sample size of the study reported in this manuscript alone is larger than any other sample size of a qualitative study conducted with blind people.