Everyone deserves to be treated with respect and dignity when they access healthcare. Person-centered care reflects this right - it focuses on being respectful and responsive to each individual's preferences and needs. However, while person-centered care has become a buzz-word within the world of healthcare quality, it is often poorly measured. We provide guidance for measuring two important constructs: patient experience and satisfction, in a recent Policy & Practice piece published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, published here.

Provider communication is one aspect of patient-experience that is highly valued by patients. While studied across levels and types of care in high-income counries, it is not often the focus of quantiative sutdies in low-resource settings. Using a secondary data from the Service Provision Assessment (SPA), we measured the determinants and outcomes of good provider communication across seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa, specifically looking at four indicators of communication that are theoretically closely linked to a parent's ability to provide care for their child. We found major deficiencies in communication during sick child visits. Poor communication, in turn, was linked to lower outcomes of patient experience, including lower satisfaction and intention to return to facility. Read more in our BMJ Open article here.