Social science & medicine
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A patient-centred approach is increasingly advocated and incorporated in medical education. Due to its multi-dimensionality, however, the concept of patient-centredness appears to be hard to measure and, consequently, to evaluate. The objective of this study was to develop an instrument to measure patient-centredness in line with one central dimension, i.e. physicians' explorative communication skills: the tendency to encourage (or discourage) patients to express their perspective on illness and treatment, by displaying facilitating and inhibiting behaviours. ⋯ Reliability of the facilitating behaviours was high, while reliability of the inhibiting behaviours was moderate. Besides infrequent observations of the inhibiting behaviours, low reliability was partly due to individual inter-rater variability. A global rating of patient-centredness appeared to correlate with the two dimensions in the expected direction: positively with the facilitating and negatively with the inhibiting dimension, indicating the convergent validity of the instrument.