TY - JOUR T1 - ‘Real’ patients and ‘real’ doctors? Doctors and patient activists in working relationships JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 591 LP - 592 DO - 10.3399/bjgp18X700157 VL - 68 IS - 677 AU - Charlotte Williamson Y1 - 2018/12/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/68/677/591.abstract N2 - Patient activists are usually patients or former patients who seek to improve patient care for other patients, not for themselves. They came into being about 60 years ago when some patients realised that patients’ and doctors’ perceptions, values, and interests could conflict as well as coincide. From their earliest days, sometimes patient activists, sometimes doctors, have sought each other out to try to reconcile some of the conflicts over standards of care and treatment. They meet variously: one-to-one; in groups of doctors and activists working regularly together for years; and arrangements in between. Doctors and patient activists are alike in many ways and this can help their working relationships.Patient activists represent, in the sense of speaking for, patients’ clinical, ethical values and their political interests. Sometimes called patient advocates or patient representatives, they are not typical of any category of patients nor a conduit for their views. Individual patients are authoritative judges of their own experiences and outcomes, but they cannot usually speak for other patients’ views and judgements because they seldom know what they are. But, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, patients began to form patient activist groups to speak for the interests of patients like themselves. Then, in the mid-1970s, some patient group members began to speak for patients’ interests in aspects of patient care that were common to all patients. Patient activists now fall into two broad categories: those who study in detail the clinical and the psychosocial experiences, views, values, and interests of one or of a few categories of patients, for … ER -