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Patient Experience Research in Canada: A Scoping Review and National Evidence Database of 3,606 Studies

Submitted:

21 May 2026

Posted:

25 May 2026

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Abstract
Canadian healthcare systems have increasingly embraced patient-centred care over the past two decades by positioning patient experience (PX) as a core indicator of quality, accountability, and system performance. Despite the policy and organizational emphasis, PX research in Canada has evolved in a fragmented manner across provinces, clinical domains, and conceptual traditions. The absence of a consolidated evidence infrastructure has limited comparability, obscured knowledge gaps, and constrained opportunities for system-level learning. This study sought to map the breadth of Canadian PX scholarship and develop a comprehensive, searchable database of PX-related studies. We conducted a scoping review following the framework of Arksey and O’Malley (2005), including systematic searches across MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and Web of Science, followed by dual independent screening and structured cataloguing. Eligible studies reported empirical data on patient experiences, perspectives, preferences, patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), patient-reported experience measures (PREMs), engagement, satisfaction, shared decision-making, quality of life, and/or barriers to care within Canadian contexts. Abstract-level data were coded using a hybrid deductive–inductive framework to classify conceptual focus, geography, and medical specialty. The resulting database includes 3,606 studies, representing the largest consolidated repository of Canadian PX evidence. Our analysis showed that research activity was concentrated in Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia, while the territories were the least represented. PX studies in oncology, primary care, and psychiatry dominated the literature, reflecting both clinical relevance and established research traditions. Conceptually, most studies referenced experience, perspective, or preference, whereas PREMs, PROMs, and engagement were less frequently mentioned. These patterns reveal structural concentrations in Canadian PX research while highlighting persistent geographic, disciplinary, and priority patterns. By creating a national Canadian PX evidence database, this work provides a foundation for comparative analyses, targeted syntheses, and policy-relevant insights. Future efforts will expand keyword coverage, incorporate additional analytic dimensions, and support longitudinal updates to strengthen learning across Canada’s healthcare systems.
Keywords: 
patient experience
;  
database
;  
Canada
;  
review
;  
scoping review
Subject: 
Public Health and Healthcare  -   Health Policy and Services

Introduction

Over the last two decades, Canadian health service organizations have increasingly emphasized patient-centred care as a cornerstone of improved outcomes and system performance. National frameworks, provincial quality strategies, and the integration of patient-reported measures into performance monitoring all highlight a growing recognition that health systems must be evaluated not only by clinical outcomes but also by the experiences of those who use them [1,2]. Within this shift, patient experience (PX) has emerged as both a key metric of healthcare quality and a driver of improvement.
PX is widely recognized as a fundamental dimension of quality, capturing the breadth of interactions patients have with healthcare systems, including access to care, communication with providers, shared decision-making, and emotional support [3]. The Beryl Institute defines PX as “the sum of all interactions, shaped by an organization’s culture, that influence patient perceptions across the continuum of care” [4]. Recent work further refines this understanding by identifying core attributes such as communication, trust, safety, transitions, and the physical and emotional environment [5].
In Canada, a substantial body of PX research has accumulated over the past decade, spanning national survey programs, provincial quality initiatives, and qualitative studies exploring patient and caregiver perspectives. However, these efforts have evolved in a fragmented way. Different provinces have adopted their own measurement tools, hospitals and health authorities often commission stand-alone studies, and academic research employs a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative methods [6,7]. This heterogeneity reflects the richness of PX inquiry but also creates silos that limit comparability and collective learning. Without a mechanism to consolidate this evidence, insights remain dispersed, duplication of effort persists, and opportunities to inform system-wide quality improvement are potentially missed. Addressing this gap requires an infrastructure that can bring together the diverse strands of Canadian PX evidence into a coherent, accessible whole.
The rationale for developing a comprehensive Canadian PX database was threefold. First, PX is central to health system performance and provides actionable insights for quality improvement and accountability [8]. Second, consolidating diverse and dispersed research enables comparative analyses and evidence syntheses, enhancing the ability of policymakers and practitioners to identify trends, address gaps, and create learning health systems, a stated goal of many large health service organizations in Canada. Third, this initiative aligns with Canada’s Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR), which calls for meaningful integration of patient perspectives into the generation and application of health research evidence [2]. By establishing a centralized repository of Canadian PX studies, this project contributes to strengthening health system improvement across the country. The objectives of this study were to (1) map the scope of existing research and data sources, (2) clarify the dimensions of PX in the Canadian context, and (3) develop a database of Canadian PX studies.

Methods

Approach

We conducted a scoping review following the framework of Arksey and O’Malley (2005), as extended by Levac et al. (2010), and reported in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) [12]. Scoping reviews are designed to map the extent, range, and nature of evidence on a topic [9,10,11,12], and are particularly suited to fields where the literature is conceptually diverse and has not been comprehensively mapped. In addition to the standard scoping review outputs, this project produced a searchable, updatable evidence database of Canadian PX studies intended for direct use by researchers, policymakers, and healthcare leaders. Moreover, PX is deeply influenced by a country’s health system design, policies, and cultural norms. In Canada, for example, universal healthcare coverage, provincial governance, and bilingual health service contexts create conditions distinct from those in other jurisdictions. A national database allows PX evidence to be interpreted within these policy and structural contexts, making findings more actionable for decision-makers. This article focuses specifically on the overall characteristics of the PX database. Subsequent articles will report on more focused analyses, generated from the database, using the scoping review methodology.

Literature Search

A comprehensive search strategy was conducted on May 22, 2024, and an updated search on September 3, 2025, in the following databases: MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and Web of Science. A sample MEDLINE search strategy was developed and adapted for other databases:
Patient adj2 (experience OR perspective* OR preference* OR view* OR interaction* OR insight* OR choice* OR desire* OR priorit* OR decision* OR belief* OR attitude* OR opinion* OR mindset*).ti,ab,kw. AND exp Canada/*

Screening Process

Screening was conducted at two levels and involved pairs of independent reviewers, following the eligibility criteria shown in Table 1.
  • Title and Abstract Screening: The first phase involved reviewing titles and abstracts to exclude records that were not about PX or related concepts, or that were not conducted in Canada.
  • Cataloguing: The second phase involved reviewing full texts for eligibility and cataloguing included studies into the database.
Discrepancies at both stages were resolved by consensus, and if consensus could not be reached, a third reviewer adjudicated.

Cataloguing

A cataloguing framework was designed to classify each study by conceptual focus, methodology, population, and medical specialty. This ensured the database would be usable across diverse needs and could be catalogued and updated with a manageable number of researchers and in a reasonable amount of time. The goal was to make this database freely accessible, allowing researchers and other interested parties to use a keyword filter search to identify all relevant PX studies if they were interested in a specific condition. Each included study was catalogued systematically to enable comprehensive search and retrieval. In this case, cataloguing is defined as marking studies with identifiers to allow quick, convenient, and user-friendly searches and the consolidation of articles with specific identifiers, which include:
  • Concepts: patient experience, perspectives, engagement, satisfaction, PREMs, PROMs, decision-making, QoL, or barriers.
  • Medical specialty: classified according to 24 pre-defined categories (e.g., oncology, pediatrics, psychiatry, family medicine). If not specified, studies were labelled “general.”
  • Geography: province, city (if available), or “not reported.”

Synthesis

We developed an a priori codebook and refined it inductively through pilot coding of a purposive sample spanning provinces, care settings, and study designs. Two reviewers double-catalogued all abstracts, met to reconcile their coding, and updated definitions and decision rules. Disagreements were resolved by consensus or third-reviewer adjudication. We conducted a descriptive synthesis to characterize the Canadian PX evidence base for the extracted identifiers.

Results

A total of 14238 articles (after removing 3383 duplicates) were reviewed. 9855 studies were excluded in the first stage of screening, with an additional 777 removed during the second stage of screening and cleaning. Ultimately, 3606 studies were deemed eligible and included in the database. A full description of the included studies and their characteristics is presented in Table 2, Table 3 and Table 4. In this section, we provide an overview of the breakdown for each thematic category that we extracted from the abstracts. A detailed synthesis of each characteristic was not possible due to the number of included studies. Detailed analyses for each topic will be disseminated in separate reports and manuscripts.

Comparing PX Across Provinces

A majority of Canadian PX studies were published in Ontario (n = 1260, 34.9%), Alberta (n = 486, 13.5%), and British Columbia (n = 483, 13.4%). However, many of these studies were conducted across multiple provinces. Among studies published exclusively within a single province, Ontario had 1003 (27.8%), Alberta had 288 (8.0%), and British Columbia had 275 (7.6%), accounting for 43.4% of all Canadian PX studies. The fewest number of PX studies were published in the three territories: Northwest Territories (n = 39, 1.1%), Nunavut (n = 32, 0.9%), and Yukon (n = 32, 0.9%), representing only 1.4% (n = 50 after removing overlap) of empirical PX literature from Canada. Frequently mentioned concepts in the abstracts of these studies included experience (n = 34, 68% of 50), perspective (n = 18, 36.0% of 50), and engagement (n = 10, 20.0% of 50). Collectively, these studies were primarily published in oncology (n = 10), primary care (n = 7), obstetrics and gynecology (n = 7), and gastroenterology (n = 6).

Comparing PX and Related Concepts

The top three concepts mentioned verbatim in the title or abstract of included studies were “experience” (n = 2140, 59.3%), “perspective” (n = 1460, 40.6%), and “preference” (n = 716, 19.9%). However, many studies mentioned multiple concepts within the same abstracts. Of studies referencing only one of these three concepts, 420 (11.6%) focused on “experience,” 3 (0.8%) on “perspective,” and 109 (3.0%) on “preference.” The three concepts least mentioned in Canadian PX studies were “PREMs” (n = 65, 1.8%), “PROMs” (n = 229, 6.4%) and “engagement” (n = 333, 9.2%). Among these studies, 1 (0.03%) was exclusively about PREMs, 15 (0.42%) reported solely on PROMs, and 11 (0.31%) referenced engagement only.

Comparing Topics/Specialties

Canadian PX studies most commonly focused on the following medical specialities: oncology (n = 623, n = 17.3%), family medicine or primary care (n = 391, 10.9%), psychiatry (n = 287, 8.0%), urology (n = 264, 7.3%), and gastroenterology (n = 226, 6.2%). Studies exclusively focusing on specific topics included 401 (11.1%) for oncology, 286 (7.9%) for primary care or family medicine, 179 (5.0%) for psychiatry, 25 (0.69%) for urology, and 145 (4.0%) for gastroenterology. Specialities with the least amount of published literature included pathology (n = 1, 0.03%), radiology (n = 7, 0.2%), dentistry (n = 17, 0.5%), plastic surgery (n = 20, 0.6%), and intensive care (n = 22, 0.6%). Collectively, these articles constituted 1.9% (n =67) of Canadian PX literature. In addition, these studies were found to primarily report on “experience” (n = 32, 47.8% of 67), “perspective” (n = 30, 44.8%), and “engagement” (n = 10, 14.9%) with most originating from the three major provinces (Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, n = 40, 59.7% of 67).

Discussion

Provinces

The provincial distribution of Canadian PX studies shows a strong concentration in Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia, while the three territories collectively accounted for a very small proportion of included studies.
  • Ontario’s dominance is consistent with its population size, the density of academic health science centres, and the concentration of research-intensive institutions. Larger provinces possess greater research infrastructure, funding opportunities, and embedded evaluation cultures within health systems, all of which facilitate PX scholarship. Alberta and British Columbia’s substantial representation likely reflects similar structural advantages.
  • The relatively limited number of studies originating from the territories warrants careful interpretation. Lower research output from the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon is not unexpected, given smaller populations, fewer academic institutions, and logistical challenges in conducting research in geographically dispersed, remote regions. However, this imbalance carries important implications. Northern and territorial health systems operate under distinct conditions — including unique care delivery models, workforce constraints, and significant Indigenous population representation — that may yield an understanding of PX that differs substantially from that in larger provinces [1,6,13]. These findings highlight a recurring challenge in Canadian health research: geographic inequities in the generation of evidence. While research concentration in larger provinces is understandable, it risks reinforcing knowledge gaps regarding PX in rural, remote, and northern contexts. Importantly, this observation should not be interpreted as a simple call for more studies in underrepresented regions, but rather as an invitation to consider how research capacity, partnerships, and context-sensitive methodologies can better capture diverse healthcare experiences across Canada.
  • The conceptual profile of territorial studies, with a strong emphasis on “experience” and a notable presence of “engagement,” may reflect the priorities and realities of healthcare delivery in these regions. Engagement research may be particularly relevant in contexts where culturally appropriate care, community partnerships, and relational aspects of healthcare are central [14,15]. Similarly, the prominence of topics such as primary care and obstetrics may align with service delivery structures and population health needs specific to northern communities.

Specialties/Topics

The distribution of Canadian PX studies shows a clear concentration in certain clinical domains, particularly oncology, primary care, psychiatry, urology, and gastroenterology.
  • Oncology emerged as the most prominent topic, both in overall frequency and in studies exclusively focused on the specialty. This pattern aligns with the well-documented emphasis on patient-centredness within cancer care, where long treatment trajectories, complex decision-making, and substantial psychosocial impacts have historically driven a strong interest in PX research [16,17]. The dominance of oncology also likely reflects structural and clinical characteristics unique to cancer care whereby oncology patients frequently interact with multiple providers and care settings over extended periods, creating numerous touchpoints that naturally lend themselves to exploring PX. In addition, oncology has benefited from strong institutional support for patient-reported measures, survivorship research, and QoL frameworks, all of which encourage systematic attention to PX.
  • The strong representation of primary care and family medicine underscores the centrality of relational continuity and access in Canadian healthcare discourse. Primary care settings often serve as the entry point and coordinating hub for patient journeys, making them particularly relevant for examining communication, coordination, and longitudinal experiences [20]. PX research in this domain also reflects policy priorities that emphasize integrated care, patient-centred medical homes, and community-based service delivery.
  • Psychiatry’s prominence highlights the historical role of mental health disciplines in advancing experiential and engagement-oriented research [19,20,21]. Mental health care has long recognized the importance of subjective experience, stigma, therapeutic relationships, and shared decision-making [22,23], which has contributed to the large number of studies in this discipline.
  • Several specialties and disciplines including pathology, radiology, dentistry, plastic surgery, and intensive care were minimally represented. This pattern may stem from a multitude of factors. Some of these fields such as pathology involve limited direct patient interaction, potentially reducing the perceived relevance of PX inquiries. Other specialties like radiology and intensive care may present methodological challenges related to episodic encounters, patient acuity, or difficulties capturing experiences in high-intensity environments.
  • The distribution of the least represented topics also raises considerations regarding knowledge gaps and research opportunities. While not all specialties require equivalent volumes of PX research, underrepresentation may obscure important PX issues, particularly in settings characterized by vulnerability, brief encounters, or highly specialized procedures. Expanding PX inquiry into such domains could enrich understanding of care experiences that are currently less visible within the literature.

PX or Related Concepts

Our findings indicate that the Canadian PX literature is dominated by the concepts of experience, perspective, and preference. Notably, very few studies focused exclusively on any single concept, and most abstracts referenced multiple PX-related constructs. In contrast, PREMs, PROMs, and engagement were the least present concepts. Overall, these patterns illustrate both the maturity and emerging directions of Canadian PX research. The field demonstrates substantial attention to experiential dimensions of care while simultaneously revealing opportunities to strengthen scholarship. More specifically:
  • The frequent co-occurrence of experience, perspective, and preference likely reflects persistent conceptual ambiguity within the field. Experience refers to patients’ perceptions and interpretations of their interactions with healthcare systems, services, and providers across the care journey; perspective denotes the viewpoint or frame of reference from which patients understand, interpret, or evaluate their health and healthcare experiences; and preference captures patients’ expressed values or choices regarding healthcare options, outcomes, or care processes [24,25]. The tendency for studies to reference multiple constructs within a single abstract may therefore indicate both genuine conceptual interrelationships and practical challenges in disentangling these dimensions during study design, data collection, and analysis. This pattern underscores the importance of greater conceptual precision and clearer reporting of how PX-related constructs are defined, operationalized, and measured. Alternatively, the observed overlap across PX concepts may be viewed as a strength of the literature. PX is inherently multidimensional and strict conceptual separation may not always be feasible or theoretically justified. Many research questions legitimately require integrating experiences, preferences, outcomes, and engagement processes. However, clearer articulation of conceptual boundaries and analytic intent is required to improve interpretability, comparability, and cumulative knowledge building across studies.
  • The relatively low frequency of PREMs, PROMs, and engagement warrants careful interpretation. Rather than signalling underreporting, this distribution may reflect the historical evolution of the Canadian PX landscape. Engagement, PREMs, and PROMs have gained greater prominence in policy and research, primarily over the past decade [26,27,28], aligning with broader international movements toward patient-centred care, value-based healthcare, and performance measurement.
  • The near absence of studies focused explicitly on PREMs highlights a potential area for methodological development. While it is neither necessary nor desirable to isolate PREMs from other PX concepts, the scarcity of PREM-focused work suggests opportunities to advance measurement science, validation studies, and implementation research. As health systems increasingly rely on standardized metrics to inform quality improvement and accountability, understanding how PREMs are conceptualized, selected, and applied within Canadian contexts becomes particularly important.

Are Provinces, Specialties, and PX Concepts Appropriate Indicators?

A central methodological consideration for this database concerns whether provinces, medical specialties, and PX concepts represent the most meaningful indicators for characterizing the Canadian PX literature. These dimensions were intentionally selected because they can be reliably and efficiently extracted from abstracts and provide an intuitively accessible, high-level snapshot of the field. However, while pragmatic and informative, these indicators also impose interpretive constraints that warrant reflection.
Identifying provinces that appear to be “lagging” in PX publications is descriptively useful but conceptually complex. Province is an administratively convenient unit, yet it may be an imperfect proxy for variation in PX, which is shaped by factors that frequently cut across provincial boundaries, including care settings, organizational practices, funding models, and population characteristics. Multi-province studies further complicate attribution, as findings may not reflect the features of any single jurisdiction. Differences in research output may therefore reflect disparities in academic infrastructure, funding environments, or reporting practices rather than genuine variation in patient experiences or priorities. As such, the province functions best as a contextual descriptor rather than a direct explanatory indicator of PX variation.
Medical specialties similarly offer a recognizable lens for organizing the literature, but their interpretive value has limits. Specialties vary considerably in patient interaction patterns, continuity of care, acuity, and typical research traditions. High publication frequency within certain specialties (e.g., oncology) may reflect methodological compatibility with PX research rather than greater experiential importance. Conversely, lower visibility in procedural or diagnostic fields (e.g., radiology) may stem from structural or epistemological factors rather than from neglect of PX. As with provinces, specialty categories are helpful for mapping broad trends but may not fully capture how experiences are produced within healthcare systems.
PX can differ markedly depending on whether they involve access, communication, decision-making, coordination, safety, emotional support, or longitudinal care trajectories. Without structured categorization of PX domains, databases risk conflating substantively different phenomena under broad PX labels. Developing clearer taxonomies of experience types could substantially improve analytic resolution.
Several additional indicators could enrich future iterations of the database and provide more theoretically meaningful characterizations of the PX landscape:
  • Care setting: inpatient, outpatient, emergency, primary care, community care, virtual care, and long-term care.
  • Level of analysis: individual, team, organization, and system.
  • Population characteristics: age groups, chronic vs. acute conditions, Indigenous populations, equity-seeking groups, and rural/remote communities.
  • Methodological approach: qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods, measurement validation, and implementation studies.
  • Experience domains: communication, decision-making, access, coordination, safety, trust, and emotional support.
  • Healthcare processes: transitions of care, navigation, continuity, and interprofessional collaboration.
  • Temporal factors: stage of care (diagnosis, treatment, survivorship, end-of-life), policy eras, or reform periods.
  • Equity: social determinants of health, structural barriers, cultural safety, and language concordance.
These dimensions may more directly capture mechanisms that generate variation in PX than administrative or disciplinary categories alone. However, many are difficult to extract consistently from abstracts, highlighting an inherent tension between feasibility and conceptual richness in large-scale evidence mapping.
Overall, provinces, specialties, and PX concepts remain appropriate as high-level organizing indicators for exploratory syntheses. However, a more nuanced understanding of Canadian PX research will likely require the incorporation of additional contextual, methodological, and experiential dimensions that better reflect the complexity of how PX is studied and relevant literature is produced. Our team has planned a series of focused syntheses to explore some of these dimensions, using this database as a starting point.

Limitations

Several limitations should be considered when interpreting this database and the patterns identified in this paper.
  • The search strategy was restricted to English-language publications. This decision was driven by feasibility constraints and the absence of resources to systematically search, screen, and interpret French-language studies or to develop a French-specific conceptual strategy for PX-related terminology. Given Canada’s bilingual research environment and the substantial body of Francophone health services scholarship, it is likely that relevant studies — particularly those originating from Quebec and Francophone institutions — were not captured, which may also explain why few studies in this database originated from Quebec.
  • The database necessarily reflects the PX terminology embedded within the search framework. PX research spans a wide and evolving vocabulary, and no search strategy can exhaustively capture all possible conceptual variants. Related constructs that were not included in this database search were patient perceptions, needs, expectations, acceptability, or satisfaction. As a result, some relevant studies may have been omitted despite addressing substantively similar phenomena. Future updates to this database will aim to expand the number of relevant keywords.
  • The database relied exclusively on abstract-level screening and extraction, without full-text review. While this approach enabled large-scale mapping, abstracts provide incomplete representations of study aims, methods, theoretical frameworks, and analytic distinctions. Important nuances — including how PX concepts were defined, operationalized, or measured — may therefore be obscured. Full-text analysis would likely refine classifications, reduce misinterpretation, and allow deeper examination of conceptual usage. However, such an undertaking would require substantially greater resources. Our research team is working on deeper, more comprehensive, and more rigorous analyses of PX across different domains.
  • This study intentionally prioritizes breadth over depth. The analyses presented are descriptive and exploratory, designed to characterize the landscape rather than adjudicate theoretical debates, evaluate methodological quality, or synthesize substantive findings. Consequently, the database should be understood as an infrastructural and scoping contribution rather than a definitive assessment of Canadian PX research. More detailed investigations — including conceptual analyses, methodological appraisals, and domain-specific syntheses — represent important next steps.

Implications

This work carries implications that extend beyond the immediate descriptive mapping of Canadian PX research. By developing and applying a country-specific methodology, the study demonstrates a structured and adaptable approach to organizing a conceptually diffuse body of literature within a defined health system context. The methodological decisions underpinning the database provide a practical framework that other jurisdictions can modify according to their own research ecosystems, policy environments, and linguistic considerations. Countries with strong commitments to patient-centred care but similarly fragmented PX scholarship may particularly benefit from adopting a comparable strategy to consolidate evidence, identify gaps, and improve knowledge accessibility. Over time, the emergence of nationally grounded databases built on analogous principles could enable more meaningful cross-country learning and international benchmarking, while preserving sensitivity to differences in healthcare organization, funding models, and sociocultural contexts that shape PX. Importantly, the value of such databases is cumulative rather than static. PX research evolves rapidly alongside policy priorities, measurement practices, and care delivery innovations; therefore, maintaining the relevance and utility of this resource will require regular, ideally yearly, updates. Iterative expansion will not only improve coverage and classification accuracy but also allow the database to function as a longitudinal observatory of conceptual, methodological, and topical shifts within the field.

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Table 1. Eligibility Criteria.
Table 1. Eligibility Criteria.
Inclusion Exclusion
• Focused on patient experiences, perspectives, or preferences within Canadian settings (including multi-country studies with Canadian data).
• PX concepts include communication, shared decision-making, quality of life (QoL), patient satisfaction, patient-reported experience measures (PREMs), patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), and barriers to care.
• Reported empirical data (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods) from patients, or — when directly linked to PX — from caregivers, care partners, parents, and providers.
• Evidence syntheses (systematic, scoping, or narrative reviews) containing empirical data.		 • Conducted entirely outside Canada.
• Represented non-empirical work (e.g., commentaries, frameworks, editorials).
• Focused solely on healthcare provider perspectives unrelated to PX.
• Examined clinical efficacy without including PROMs or patient perspectives.
• Reported on tool development or pilot testing without empirical exploration of patient perspectives.
Table 2. Geography.
Table 2. Geography.
Geography n (%)
Canada only or multiple countries including Canada Canada only 2886 (80.0)
Multiple countries including Canada 719 (19.9)
Not reported 1 (0.1)
Province Province reported 2321 (64.4)
Province not reported 1285 (35.6)
Alberta 486 (13.5)
British Columbia 483 (13.4)
Manitoba 176 (4.9)
New Brunswick 98 (2.7)
Newfoundland and Labrador 106 (2.9)
Northwest Territories 38 (1.1)
Nova Scotia 171 (4.7)
Nunavut 32 (0.9)
Prince Edward Islands 61 (1.7)
Ontario 1260 (34.9)
Quebec 427 (11.8)
Saskatchewan 142 (3.9)
Yukon 32 (0.9)
Table 3. PX or Related Terms.
Table 3. PX or Related Terms.
PX Term n (%)
Communication: The exchange of information, understanding, and meaning between patients and healthcare providers during care. 634 (17.6)
Decision-making: The process by which patients and healthcare providers choose among healthcare options, including shared decision-making activities. 680 (18.9)
Engagement: The degree to which patients are actively involved in their healthcare, including participation, activation, and partnership in care processes. 333 (9.2)
Experience: Patients’ perceptions and interpretations of their interactions with healthcare systems, services, and providers across the care journey. 2140 (59.3)
Patient barriers: Factors that hinder patients’ access to, participation in, or benefit from healthcare services, including structural, financial, cultural, or personal obstacles. 632 (17.5)
Patient-reported experience measures: Standardized instruments in which patients report on their experiences of healthcare delivery and service quality. 65 (1.8)
Patient-reported outcome measures: Standardized instruments in which patients report on their health status, symptoms, functioning, or well-being. 229 (6.4)
Patient satisfaction: Patients’ evaluation of healthcare services based on the extent to which their expectations and needs are met. 550 (15.3)
Perspective: The viewpoint or frame of reference from which patients understand, interpret, or evaluate their health and healthcare experiences. 1463 (40.6)
Preference: Patients’ expressed values or choices regarding healthcare options, outcomes, or care processes. 716 (19.9)
Quality of life: Patients’ self-perceived overall well-being across physical, psychological, and social domains of health. 696 (19.3)
Table 4. Medical Specialties.
Table 4. Medical Specialties.
Medical Specialties n (%)
Allergy and Immunology 55 (1.5)
Anesthesiology 75 (2.1)
Cardiology 205 (5.7)
Dentistry 17 (0.5)
Dermatology 46 (1.3)
Emergency medicine 88 (2.4)
Endocrinology 149 (4.1)
Family medicine or primary care 391 (10.9)
Gastroenterology 225 (6.2)
General or not specified 355 (9.8)
Geriatrics 91 (2.5)
Hematology 93 (2.6)
Infectious disease 133 (3.7)
Intensive care 22 (0.6)
Medical genetics 66 (1.8)
Nephrology 162 (4.5)
Neurology 222 (6.2)
Obstetrics and gynecology 205 (5.7)
Oncology 623 (17.3)
Ophthalmology 63 (1.7)
Otolaryngology 28 (0.8)
Palliative or end-of-life care 172 (4.8)
Pathology 1 (0.03)
Pediatrics 118 (3.3)
Physical medicine and rehabilitation 136 (3.7)
Plastic surgery 20 (0.6)
Psychiatry 287 (8.0)
Pulmonology 110 (3.1)
Radiology 7 (0.2)
Rheumatology 195 (5.4)
Surgery 39 (1.1)
Urology 264 (7.3)
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