Abstract:
BACKGROUND: Facilitation and collaboration differentiates person-centred practice (PcP) from
biomedical practice. In PcP, a person-centred consultation requires clinicians to juggle three
processes: facilitation, clinical reasoning and collaboration. How best to measure PcP in these
processes remains a challenge.
AIM: To assess the measurement of facilitation and collaboration in selected reviews of PcP
instruments.
METHODS: Ovid Medline and Google Scholar were searched for review articles evaluating
measurement instruments of patient-centredness or person-centredness in the medical
consultation.
RESULTS: Six of the nine review articles were selected for analysis. Those articles considered the
psychometric properties and rigour of evaluation of reviewed instruments. Mostly, the articles
did not find instruments with good evidence of reliability and validity. Evaluations in South
Africa rendered poor psychometric properties. Tools were often not transferable to other sociocultural-linguistic contexts, both with and without adaptation.
CONCLUSION: The multiplicity of measurement tools is a product of many dimensions of personcentredness, which can be approached from many perspectives and in many service scenarios
inside and outside the medical consultation. Extensive research into the myriad instruments
found no single valid and reliable measurement tool that can be recommended for general use.
The best hope for developing one is to focus on a specific scenario, conduct a systematic
literature review, combine the best items from existing tools, involve multiple disciplines and
test the tool in real-life situations.
