Patient-centred care has become an important model for health-care delivery, especially in cancer care. The implementation of this model includes patient-centred communication between the clinician and his or her patient. However, most research on patient-centred communication focuses on the clinicians’ initiative: what clinicians should do and what information they should seek to elicit from patients. It is equally important to recognize what each individual patient can contribute about his or her unique perspective on the disease, its treatment, and the effects on what is important to this patient. This thesis reports the development of a system for analyzing over 1500 utterances made by patients in eight video-recorded oncology consultations at the British Columbia Cancer Agency, Vancouver Island Centre. The analysis distinguishes between biomedical information that the patient can provide and patient-centred information, which contributes the individual patient’s unique perspective on any aspect of his or her illness or treatment. The resulting analysis system includes detailed operational definitions with examples, a decision tree, and .eaf files in ELAN software for viewing and for recording decisions. Two psychometric tests demonstrated that the system is replicable: high inter-analyst reliability (90% agreement between independent analysts) on a random sample of the data set and cross-validation to the remainder of the data set. A supplemental idiographic analysis of each consultation illustrates the important role that patient-centred information played in these consultations. This system could be an important tool for teaching clinicians to recognize the individual information that patients can provide and its relevance to their care. / Graduate / 0992 / 0451 / 0350 / shealing@uvic.ca