Point of Care: Seeing the person in the patient

The Point of Care programme aims to improve the experience of care across the health system for patients and their families, starting with acute care in hospitals. Enabling staff to see – and care for – the person in the patient demands compassion, empathy, emotional support, physical comfort and the involvement of family and friends.

Our goal is to enable staff to deliver the quality of care they would want for themselves and their own families. Point of Care is working with senior leaders to achieve the changes in culture and management that are needed, and developing methods to support all staff to deliver care.

A patient’s experience is about more than the ward, team or directorate: it is about the organisation and the wider health care system. To bring about changes, senior leaders need to demonstrate in actions as well as words the value they place on patient experience. Health care systems are under tremendous pressure, but behaviours and practices that depersonalise patients are not inevitable.

Our approach

Point of Care differs from other work on patient-centred care because it takes a systems-wide approach to improving patient experience in hospitals.

Everyone, at all levels in an organisation, can influence a patient’s experience, from commissioners to auxiliary staff, administrators to clinicians. Their actions can all have consequences for care, from financial investments to staffing levels, bed management to communications between caregivers and, crucially, the interactions between patients and individual staff members.

Our work

Point of Care is currently in its first phase. We are:

• reviewing and analysing the evidence for how to improve patient experience
• developing ways of assessing and comparing patient experience
• reviewing methods for actively involving patients and their families in their own care and shaping services
• reviewing the evidence on methods to support staff, both as individuals and as teams
• learning from best practice in the UK and abroad
• designing new approaches to improving patient experience
• negotiating collaborative partnerships with a number of hospitals to test new ways of working.

We will be publishing the first findings in autumn 2008.

We will then be launching two further phases. During the second phase, running from late 2008 until 2012, we will be testing and evaluating interventions to improve patients’ and families’ experiences and developing methods to support clinical and non-clinical staff.

The third phase, starting in 2010 and running until 2013, will share the learning from Point of Care, spreading the innovations and products that prove to be effective.

Who we are

• Jocelyn Cornwell, Programme Director
• Joanna Goodrich, Senior Researcher and Project Manager

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• Point of care: improving patients’ experience (206kb)