Patient empowerment is a high priority for healthcare policy makers in many countries. By increasing the role of patients, health care providers should become more responsive to patients' needs and preferences and deliver better quality care. Patients can participate in health care in many ways. These include communicating directly to healthcare professionals in patient centred consultations; contributing to routine practice outside the consultation through quality of life questionnaires and patient satisfaction surveys; and, increasingly, by using information on health and health care through internet channels.

Many questionnaires on patient satisfaction have been developed in the past decade but they do not all meet the needs of either the consumers or the healthcare professionals.¹ Before being used on a wide scale, new approaches to capturing patients' views need to be assessed in well designed studies with a similar stringency to that which is applied to clinical interventions. In this issue of Quality in Health Care Grogan et al describe the validation of an instrument for measuring patient satisfaction with general practice.²

Users …