RESEARCH ARTICLE i n l

Quality of care from the patient’s perspective is increas-ingly in the spotlight, but what exactly does it mean? From the mid-80s onward, there has been a general shift in healthcare to view patients as consumers of care [1]. With that shift has come a notion that consumer satis-faction can serve to measure the quality of public health services [2,3]. Throughout the past decades, the same concept was studied, though with different names and with slightly different contents, from patient satisfaction, patient empowerment, patient-centeredness to patient experiences. Patient scores of satisfaction with certain aspects of healthcare proved hard to interpret, as the term satisfaction was not well defined and its simplicity did not acknowledge the multidimensional nature of satisfaction [4]. A shift was made from measuring the opinion of the patient to measuring facts to assess the quality of care. With that came a tendency to see the pa-tient as a whole, autonomous person (patient-centered-ness) who needed to be empowered to act as a full partner in the treatment process (patient empowerment) [5]. The more general term ‘patient experience ’ arose around the * Correspondence