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I am a physician turned patient, and am a vocal advocate for patient partnership in all areas of healthcare, including research. While I support including patient partners in every step of the research project, the eConsult survey you designed failed to deliver on the claim that you made in this article that including patient partners would eliminate distress of patients answering this survey. I can say this as I was asked, and agreed to participate in this survey myself as a patient last month, and I suffered great harm from language used in the survey. As a patient with multiple disabilities, I was particularly hurt by the use of the language "handicap bus" that was used in the survey. While this term handicap may still be used in passing, it's quite unanimous amongst the disability community that this is not an acceptable term in 2022 as the very definition of the term means 'inferior to'. An error like this should have been caught at some point along the way, either amongst the research team, or the ethics board that approved it. When engaging patient partners, specific attention needs to be paid to ensuring diverse perspectives of patients are included. It's disappointing that a CIHR funded project failed to catch this. Furthermore, I would suggest emphasizing the inclusion of diverse patient partners under the best practices box 1 that you have created. I implore the research team to modify the language in this survey immediately, so as...
Show MoreCompeting Interests: None declared.