Infertility care in Royan Institute: a patient centeredness analysis

As treatment focus has shifted from disease to patient, the importance of patient-centered care has increased. This study is aimed to investigate on patient centeredness in an infertility care center.
This was a cross sectional study of a sample of 268 patients attending to the Royan Institute infertility care center, in Tehran, Iran. We used The Patient-centeredness Questionnaire-Infertility (PCQ-Infertility) to collect the data. It has 45 questions and 8 dimensions (access, information and explanation, communication, patient involvement in treatment, respect for patient's values, continuity of care, competence of staff and organization of services).
The analysis showed that out of 0 to 3, the score of patient centeredness in infertility care was 1.26. The highest score with mean of 1.49 was for communication and the lowest score with mean of 1.02 was for continuity of care. Also the result showed that there was no significant difference among patient centeredness care score among men and women (p=0.50) and also among patients who were pregnant and those who were not (p=0.058).
Providing patient centered care especially in infertility care, the process of care apart from providing patient participation should include emotional support for patients.