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Moving towards person-centered care, with equal partnership between healthcare professionals and patients, requires a solid role for the patient in the education of students and professionals. Patients can be involved as teachers, assessors, curriculum developers, and policy-makers. Yet, many of the initiatives with patients are isolated, small events for targeted groups and there is a lack of patient involvement at the institutional level. To support educators in involving patients, both at the institutional level and at single educational encounters, we offer twelve practical tips. This paper came about through an innovative collaboration between healthcare professionals, educators, teachers, and patients. These tips can be used as a tool to start or reinforce patient involvement in health professions education and provide guidance on how to make it a sustainable part of the curriculum. The article involves organizational conditions for success, tips for sustainable partnerships, ideas for curriculum design and proposes concrete teaching strategies. Finally, besides practical tips, we stress that involving patients in education is not business as usual, and paradoxically this needs to be acknowledged before it can become business as usual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to an e-consult: the development and validation of a protocol for the doctor From Media Synchronicity Theory and the so-called egocentrism hypothesis, it is predicted that answering a patient message in an e-consultation in comparison with the face-to-face consultation places a number of specific requirements to ensure that the patient values the communication positively. These requirements have been elaborated on the basis of a number of preliminary studies and converted into a protocol against which a doctor's answer can be tested. In a main study, (a) it was investigated to what extent answers that advanced medical students create without any prior instruction comply with the protocol and (b) whether answers that meet the protocol to a higher degree indeed receive a higher rating from patients than answers that don't comply with the protocol. The latter appears to be the case. Because it appears that e-consultations of many medical students do not yet comply with the protocol, we can conclude that this protocol can form the basis for training doctors and medical students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]