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The Article in Brief
Patient-Doctor Depth-of-Relationship Scale: Development and Validation
Matthew J. Ridd, and colleagues
Background The ongoing relationship, or continuity, between doctor and patient is a key element of family medicine/general practice. Tools to measure the impact of continuity have tended to look at duration, rather than depth, of the relationship. This report presents a new patient self-completion instrument designed to measure the depth of the patient-doctor relationship.
What This Study Found The Patient-Doctor Depth-of-Relationship Scale can be used to evaluate the value of personal continuity. It has an eight-item scale with good internal reliability. Application of the scale finds an association between seeing the same doctor and a deep patient-doctor relationship, although the relationship appears to be nonlinear.
Implications
- Future research is needed to further establish the validity of the scale and examine a possible association between patient-doctor depth of relationship and improved patient care.
Supplemental Figure & Tables 1-2
Supplemental Figure 1. Test-retest data (Bland Altman plot).
Files in this Data Supplement:
- Supplemental data: Figure & Tables 1-2 - PDF file, 3 pages, 176 KB