Report
Patients as partners:
Building collaborative relationships among professionals, patients, carers and communities
Our guide explores practical ways to develop collaborative relationships among health and care professionals, patients, carers and community partners.
Comments
Many Thanks
Hildegard
It's about time patients should be seen as untapped assets; NOT problems to be "fixed".
Patient Leaders need investment & support if we're going to have meaningful & lasting impact on the system we all care about!
@Patient_Leader
Abolish the targets.
Are you brave enough to say this? Because amid all the noise about changing culture I don't see this simple statement being made. Unless you remove the targets, there will always be pressure to meet them, whatever. When you do remove the targets, all of them, for ever, you will be left with an understanding of the purpose of the NHS and the professional motivation of all the players to achieve it. Given what we know of the motivation of NHS staff, that sounds rather powerful to me.
It does make me reflect on how many times in my career we have had central directives, policies and position papers that call for public services to be more patient-centred. Yet nothing seems to change- why not?
In one sense, being patient-centred is blindingly simple- no patient should be treated with anything other than enormous compassion, dignity and respect.
Over and above these basic human rights though, being patient-centred is remarkably hard to define- it will mean different things in different contexts.
Most clinicians want to do good (beneficience) and not do harm (non-maleficience). They will in general try to do good according to their own set of underlying values and ethical principles- many of which will be informed by the context within which they usually work.
GPs, for instance, often tend to think of themselves as patient advocates- on the whole, they think of patient-centredness as being benficience through support for autonomy. In this context, being patient-centred might well mean giving patients information, choice and control
On the other hand, a cardiac surgeon might well define being patient centred as being as good a technical operator as they can possibly be. As a potential future patient of a cardiac surgeon- I know this is what I would want. According to the principle of utilitarianism, this 'task-oriented' approach to their work might mean that on occasions- in urgent clinical situations for instance- performing the task well becomes more important than supporting patient autonomy.
The point is, we need to be much clearer about what being patient-centred actually means. And we need to be much clearer about what being patient centred means in different contexts. And over and above this, we need to clarify not just the attitudes and values that mark out good patient-centred care in different contexts-- we need to exemplify, teach and measure the behaviours and skills that we (and more importantly patients) want our workforce to employ
Add your comment