Partners in care
Experience at the UK National Health Service. The flow of information should not be confined to the actual medical treatment but should also include social and psychological aspects of each patient’s life as well as make room for a wider dialogue with family members and peers. This is not something professionals will simply take on. It requires a change of both actions and attitudes. “The role of healthcare professionals has to be redefined – they have to be taught this new way of thinking and they have to learn to do things differently,” as Adrian Sieff states.
“What is needed right now is involvement of patients at all levels – in evaluating boards of hospitals and doctors, ethical committees and so on,” says Antonio Gaudioso, General Secretary of Cittadinanzattiva, an Italian non-profit consumer organization. Healthcare providers have an important job in ensuring that members of staff adopt a new approach to care, in which patients are placed at the centre of every single action they perform. The idea of partnerships should be regarded as a precondition for good care throughout the healthcare sector. See text box. Of course, patient satisfaction is not the product of a single encounter but an experience of the care process as a whole.
providers
Encourage all employees to put patients at the centre Person-centred care requires that all persons and institutions involved in healthcare put the patient at the centre at all times.
“In all patient encounters, even when the secretary answers the phone, the patient should not be met in a hurried way. Patient-centred care is simply a broader concept of care,” says Robert C. Smith, Michigan State University. To optimize this experience, members of staff have to cooperate across wards, departments and institutions. It is vital that managers ensure that the concept of partnership extends beyond the doctor-patient meeting and that it becomes the cultural and behavioural cornerstone of all interaction between colleagues as well.
Person-centred care in the physical environment Developing a person-centred culture should also include the physical environment. It should signal and support the concept of partnership and co-creation. Dr. Lee Chien Earn from Changi General Hospital in Singapore urges providers to keep the patients’ needs in mind whenever they build new hospital units or renew existing ones. “For instance: when we build environments for elderly people, we should understand that they perceive colours and lighting differently than younger people,” he says. This philosophy formed the basis of the design and construction of a new ward at the hospital in Singapore. Asking all stakeholders to contribute and even participate has also been the underlying prin-
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ciple for the design and construction of a new University Hospital in Odense, Denmark: “Twenty-five years ago, we would have built a hospital that favoured the chief physician. Our new hospital will not only be designed according to the needs of physicians but also to other staff members as well as patients and their families,” says Carl Holst, Chairman of The Region of Southern Denmark, in charge of the new hospital. Design centres like IDEA in San Francisco and G10 in Denmark offer developers facilities where they test the building environment through a process where patients and staff members are invited to contribute – from reviewing the first drafts on paper to creating rooms and inventory made of papier mâché or plywood.