Review Article - Special Collection: COPC-based Integrated District Health System

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

Jakobus M. Louw, Tessa S. Marcus, Jannie Hugo
African Journal of Primary Health Care & Family Medicine | Vol 12, No 1 | a2170 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.4102/phcfm.v12i1.2170 | © 2020 Jakobus Murray Louw, Tessa Shein Marcus, Jannie Hugo | This work is licensed under CC Attribution 4.0
Submitted: 11 June 2019 | Published: 04 March 2020

About the author(s)

Jakobus M. Louw, Department of Family Medicine, School of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa
Tessa S. Marcus, Department of Family Medicine, School of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa
Jannie Hugo, Department of Family Medicine, School of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

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 socio-cultural-linguistic contexts, both with and without adaptation.

Conclusion: The multiplicity of measurement tools is a product of many dimensions of person-centredness, 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.


Keywords

review; psychometric properties; measurement instruments; person-centeredness; patient-centeredness

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Crossref Citations

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