How to measure person-centred practice – an analysis of reviews of the literature

• Published in: African journal of primary health care & family medicine Vol. 12; no. 1; pp. 1 - 8
• Main Authors: Marcus, Tessa S, Hugo, Johannes F.M, Louw, Jakobus M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Portuguese
• Published: South Africa AOSIS 2020; African Online Scientific Information Systems (Pty) Ltd t/a AOSIS; AOSIS (Pty) Ltd; AOSIS Publishing
• Subjects: Biology; Collaboration; Health care costs; Health care industry; Health care reform; Health Care Sciences & Services; Health insurance; Measurement instruments; Measuring instruments; Medical consultation; Medical economics; Medicine, General & Internal; National health insurance; Patient satisfaction; Patient-centeredness; Person-centeredness; Psychometric properties; Quality; Quantitative psychology; Reasoning; Retirement benefits; Review; Validity; South Africa; psychometric properties; patient-centeredness; person-centeredness; measurement instruments; review
• ISSN: 2071-2928; 2071-2936; 2071-2936
• DOI: 10.4102/phcfm.v12i1.2170

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.