Patient-centred care

Patient-centred care has many definitions but a well-accepted one is offered by the Institute of Medicine: ‘providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions’. In today’s NHS it has come to mean putting the patient and their experience at the heart of quality improvement.

Patient-centred care is one aspect of health care quality, as important as care being safe, clinically effective, timely and equitable.

Patient-centred care is multi-dimensional; it encompasses all aspects of how services are delivered to patients. The Institute of Medicine offers this list: 

Measuring patients’ experience is an integral part of health care regulation and improvement. All hospitals measure patient experience both for their own purposes and as part of national regulation by the Care Quality Commission. In primary care, GP payments are partly linked to patient satisfaction survey results through the Quality and Outcomes Framework. The Operating Framework 2009/10 asks NHS organisations to gather real-time patient feedback. Trusts and PCTs are now working with commercial and NHS service providers such as NHS Choices to see how this might be done and to explore how they translate feedback into service improvement.

Patient-centred care is at the heart of various work programmes in the NHS. The Department of Health programmes on dignity and privacy to end mixed sex accommodation are patient-centred intiatives, but ones that link to nurses’ preferred terms. In long-term care, the drive to put the patient at the centre of care informs initiatives such as personal health budgets, self care and expert patient programmes.