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Patient satisfaction is important to patient outcomes. Previous attempts to conceptualize satisfaction have often taken an atheoretical approach and focused on doctors' communication skills. Patients are becoming more active health consumers involved in their health care and current definitions of patient satisfaction may not accurately reflect patient expectations about their health consultations. Earlier research found that meeting patients' emotional needs - through empathy and patient-centered communication - is important to patient satisfaction. New research is needed to explore how those needs can be met given the changing trend in patient behaviors and the focus on patient-centredness. This study employed two communication theories - the Willingness to Communicate Model and Communication Accommodation Theory - to consider both patients' communicative decisions, and the intergroup features of the health context that can influence communicative behaviors. Two hundred and fiftythree patients from health clinics in Canada and Australia described what satisfaction meant to them, and identified what aspects of their health consultation were satisfying (or not), and we investigated their perceptions of doctor's emotional expression. Results suggest that patient perceptions of their participation in the consultation predicts their perceptions of doctor emotional expression, and their satisfaction with the consultation. Patients want both emotional and medical needs met in an environment that balances interpersonal and intergroup communication. Our findings suggest the need to expand current definitions of patient satisfaction, patient-centredness and emotional expression. We discuss the implications of these findings for health practitioners and consider future research that addresses the need for more individualized health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the ways in which health care providers (general practitioners and specialists) and patients communicate with each other about managing musculoskeletal (MSK) disorders, a major cause of long-term pain and physical disability. In managing their illness, patients must interact closely with health care providers, who play a large role in transferring knowledge to them. In-depth interviews with patients, general practitioners, and specialist rheumatologists in Australia and Canada were analyzed using Leximancer (a text-mining tool). Results indicated that, in their communication, doctors subtly emphasized accepting and adjusting to the illness ('new normal'), whereas patients emphasized pain relief and getting 'back to normal.' These results suggest that doctors and patients should accommodate in their communication across subtle and often unexpressed differences in the priorities of provider and patient, or they are likely to be at cross purposes and thus less effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]