Whilst this cross-sectional analysis study has provided some insight into patient's views of the importance of prognostic discussion within the consultation, future qualitative research could provide more in-depth insights.
Since findings of our study highlight the particular difficulties of broaching the topic in consultations about unrelated problems, future research could focus mainly on exploring this in more detail.
In order to help inform safe, effective and coordinated maternity care that reflects the full breadth of practitioner consultations amongst pregnant women, future research must include examination of decision-making and communication between pregnant women and their maternity care providers about CAM practitioner use.
If the Chinese-CARE Measure proves to be a feasible, acceptable, and robust tool it may have wide-spread utility in the formative and/or summative assessment of medical students and primary care doctors in Hong Kong and mainland China, as well as in future research on consultation quality.
The nature of negative talk and discussions around management within the consultation have emerged as areas for future research.
The highest priority for future research identified by consultation group participants was research into the 'impact on life, how to live with cancer and related support issues'.
The use of bi-lingual dictionaries as an aid to communication both before and during the consultation is another interesting topic for future research.
Future research could include observations of consultations and health professionals could also be interviewed to investigate their consultation experiences, including their views about benefits and challenges of having a child present or absent during the consultation.
The current study provides preliminary information on the importance of time in the consultation and positive behaviors by physicians that can guide future research and is immediately beneficial to clinicians, researchers, and health-care policy makers.
In the view of these findings, we consider it important for future research and according policy consultation to better consider strengths and weaknesses of sustainability assessments based on distance-to-target calculations, and also the impact of the selected reference values, targets defined and scoring systems applied on results and recommendations.
