Elderly, multimorbid patients are a primary target group for patient-centred care, and fostering patient-centredness (PC) in this group has been associated with different healthcare aims such as safety and quality of healthcare. However, evidence on effects of patient-centred interventions is still limited and mixed. In part, the lack of consistent evidence has its roots in a conceptual uncertainty of the term 'PC', which also hampers the development of assessment tools for PC. Consequently, reviews on assessment instruments of PC reveal problems regarding the quality of identified assessment instruments and regarding their comparability. Some of these reviews focus on the elderly. However, while the concept of multimorbidity is partly inherent, this focus is not explicit in any of the reviews.The aim of this systematic review is to identify assessment instruments of PC in the multimorbid elderly, using a subgroup-specific definition of PC ('subgroup-specific integrative model of PC') as the conceptual underpinning, and to provide a critical quality appraisal of their psychometric properties.

Source:

BMJ Open