Introduction:

Health’s chronic conditions demand continuous care with an approach to the clinical method focused in the person, which includes physician-patient relation as a cross-sectional element where confidence is the core. This confidence would mediate between the management of the patient’s chronic conditions and their effects.

Objective:

To identify the effect of confidence in health provider/professional-patient relation in different health contexts.

Methods:

It was carried out a critical review of related literature from June to August, 2017 in order to understand the role of confidence in health provider- patient relation, and its relation with the results in health. The initial search was with the keywords: ´´confidence´´, ´´physician´´, health provider´´, ´´patient´´ and their equivalents in English and French, in the electronic databases JSTOR (Philosophy), Race Relations Abstracts, SocIndex with Full Text, Social Science Database, PubMed Central, CINAHHL, Nursing & Allied Health Database, Web of Science, Academic Search Complete and ProQuest Central. There were carried out different search strategies with the keywords and the boolean operator ´´AND´´.

Conclusions:

Confidence is a variable of the patient-health provider relation that has a strategic role in therapeutic processes. Then, it is important to consider it as a part of health care, specially as a point of collaboration and commitment of the patient with his/her health. Thus, it is necessary to create instruments that measure this variable in accordance with the cultural characteristics of Latin American countries and this can be extended to all having a care role in the direct contact with patients.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )