Articles
What is Patient-centred care? (8)
- November 16, 2021
- Posted by: mghalandari
- Category: Definition Digital health
Patient-centred care is an innovative approach to the planning, delivery, and evaluation of health care that is grounded in mutually beneficial partnerships among health care providers, patients, and families. Patient- and family-centered care applies to patients of all ages, and it may be practiced in any health care setting.
dimension of Patient-centered care are:
- respect for patients’ preferences and values
- emotional support
- physical comfort
- information, communication and education
- continuity and transition
- coordination of care
- the involvement of family and friends
- access to care.
Patient-centred care also has a focus on staff. To succeed, a patient-centred approach should also address the staff experience, because the staff’s ability and inclination to care effectively for patients is compromised if they do not feel cared for themselves.
Organization-specific concepts of patient-centred care have also emerged. Some organisations identify individual elements of patient-centred care as part of an overall patient-centred care framework.
core elements in patient-centred care frameworks are:
- education and shared knowledge
- involvement of family and friends
- collaboration and team management
- sensitivity to nonmedical and spiritual dimensions of care
- respect for patient needs and preferences
- the free flow and accessibility of information.
common concepts in definitions of patient- centred care:
- informing and involving patients
- eliciting and respecting patient preferences
- engaging patients in the care process
- treating patients with dignity
- designing care processes to suit patient needs, not providers
- ready access to health information
- continuity of care
Consumer-centred care
The term consumer-centred care is sometimes preferred to patient-centred care to acknowledge that care should focus on people who are actual or potential users of healthcare services. For some, the term patient has passive overtones. In contrast, the term consumer is seen as a more active term, encompassing the need to engage people as partners in health service delivery. The term consumer also aligns with client and user in business and management models of service delivery.
Person-centred care
The term patient-centred care is often used interchangeably in primary care settings with terms such as person-centred care, person-centredness, relationship-centred care and personalised care. This term appears more frequently in literature on the care of older people and focuses on developing relationships and plans of care collaboratively between staff and patients. This term values the needs of patients, carers and staff, with emphasis on the reciprocal nature of all relationships.
Personalised care
Personalised care is the integrated practice of medicine and patient care based on one’s unique biology, behaviour and environment. Personalised care uses genomics and other molecular-level techniques in clinical care; as well as health information technology, to integrate clinical care with the individualised treatment of patients.
Family-centred care
This term emerged in the US in the 1980s in response to the needs of families with children who could not leave hospital. These families sought to work more collaboratively with healthcare professionals and successfully advocated for changes to enable them to care for their children in home and community settings. More generally, children’s hospitals in the US adopted the concept of family-centred care in recognition of input from parents and family members to improve the care of patients who were too young to tell physicians and nurses how they felt.
family-centred care also relates to children’s health care and encompasses the concepts of parental participation; partnership and collaboration between the healthcare team and parents in decision making; family-friendly environments that normalise family functioning within the healthcare setting as much as possible; and care of other family members.
Recent research has shown that there are many benefits to patient-centred care, broadly categorised as care experience, clinical and operational benefits. Studies show that when healthcare administrators, providers, patients and families work in partnership, the quality and safety of health care rises, costs decrease, and provider and patient satisfaction increase.