The objective was to assess the quality of the doctor-patient relationship, following a clinical consultation, through the development of a questionnaire that asks identical questions to doctors and patients. Therefore, a systematic search of the world literature in eight languages to include all available questionnaires measuring aspects of the doctor-patient relationship led to two separate comprehensive sets of questions, which were administered separately to doctor and patient pairs following clinical consultations. Principal component and factor analyses were performed to identify common factors in the doctor-patient relationship. On the basis of results and review of common questions in doctor and patient questionnaires, a questionnaire was constructed, with identical questions for doctors and patients. Concurrent validity was assessed through a 1-10 analogue scale and correlation between doctor and patient responses was studied. As an outcome, sets of 122 and 137 questions for doctors and patients respectively have been identified and administered to 461 doctor-patient pairs following clinical consultation. Principal component analyses revealed 24 factors for doctors and 31 factors for patients, accounting for 73.3 and 70.8% of variance respectively. A series of factor analyses showed that factors vary for patients, doctors and medical specialties. A final analysis including only common questions for doctors and patients led to a two-factor solution, resulting to a 16item questionnaire. Together these findings suggest that the Doctor-Patient Relationship Assessment Questionnaire (DoPRAQ-16) has good psychometric properties, while common questions provide a common language, for measuring the doctor-patient relationship.

Within one week of surgery, traffic accident patients were compared with a variety of other surgery patients on measures of anxiety, depression, general psychological health and coping strategies. Even when differences in age and gender between groups were controlled for, patients who had just undergone surgery following traffic accidents reported significantly greater use of emotion‐focused coping strategies than all other groups except a gynaecological group, and significantly less use of task‐oriented and avoidance coping strategies than all other groups except general surgery. There were no significant differences in levels of depression or anxiety between the accident group and the other main surgery groups. It is argued that the use of emotion‐focused coping in accident patients represents either a direct vulnerability factor for accidents, or an indicator of underlying psychopathology which in turn may represent a primary vulnerability factor.