ABSTRACT
Contemporary medicine is awash with ideas about the patient-as-person. Enablement, empowerment, negotiation and patient-centredness all form a vital part of a professional vocabulary that stresses that the role of the doctor is to respond in some new way to the patient as an experiencing individual, rather than as a representative object of organic or psychogenic pathology. In general practice, especially, the patient-as-person is given enormous significance as a partner in the often complex negotiations that take place in the consultation. As, increasingly, the quality of doctor-patient interaction has become a proxy measure for quality of care, patient-centredness is expressed in the construction of formal models of doctor-patient interaction.
