What Patients Want From Primary Care Consultations: A Discrete Choice Experi- ment to Identify Patients ’ Priorities

PURPOSE The consultation is fundamental to the delivery of primary care, but different ways of organizing consultations may lead to different patient experi-ences in terms of access, continuity, technical quality of care, and communica-tion. Patients ’ priorities for these different issues need to be understood, but the optimal methods for assessing priorities are unclear. This study used a discrete choice experiment to assess patients ’ priorities. METHODS We surveyed patients from 6 family practices in England. The patients chose between primary care consultations differing in attributes such as ease of access (wait for an appointment), choice (fl exibility of appointment times), con-tinuity (physician’s knowledge of the patient), technical quality (thoroughness of physical examination), and multiple aspects of patient-centered care (interest in patient’s ideas, inquiry about patient’s social and emotional well-being, and involvement of patient in decision making). We used probit models to assess the relative priority patients placed on different attributes and to estimate how muc