In her inaugural speech at the Radboud University Nijmegen (September 28^th, 2012), Sandra van Dulmen stressed the importance of looking beyond the well-known paths of education and training and of unravelling multi-layered context factors that hamper or facilitate improvements in the way health care providers and patients communicate.

Respect and communication are weighed most heavily in patient’s overall assessment of care. Structure aspects, such as waiting times, also contribute to the overall assessment. Managers and professionals in health care should focus on improving these aspects if they aim to increase the overall judgement of care given by patients. These findings were recently published by the NIVEL and the Centre for Consumer Experience in Health Care in the journal BMJ Quality & Safety.
 

The most important determinants for general practitioners’ (GPs) discussion of medication use with their patients are the time pressure experienced and their familiarity with their patients. These findings were published by NIVEL researchers in the International Journal of Person Centered Medicine.

Cognitive behavioural therapy using a pocket computer reduces dysfunctional complaint-related thoughts and pain in patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. The treatment appears to be effective in the short run and in part also in the long run. This is the outcome of a study conducted by researchers from NIVEL and published in Journal of Psychosomatic Research.