Editor’s Notebook: New Resources for Patient Engagement
March/April 2011
Editor’s Notebook
New Resources for Patient Engagement
It’s easy enough to say that patient engagement—the process of including patients as respected and equal partners by removing barriers to information and participation—is important. It’s also easy to recognize that it is the right thing to do, but not so easy to know how to initiate and accomplish the evolution to fully engaged, activated patients. Achieving meaningful patient engagement is a formidable challenge because it calls for changes in attitudes and behavior across a wide cross section of those who deliver and those who receive care. While this work benefits from solid interpersonal skills and creativity, it also needs to be supported with data and careful study.
Organizations are beginning to offer guidance grounded in experience and research that will help others successfully engage patients in their care and encourage the public to participate in healthcare reform. Some recent publications contribute to these efforts, in large part because they do not underestimate the challenge of authentic, sustained engagement of individuals and the public in this transformation.
Achieving an Exceptional Patient and Family Experience of Inpatient Hospital Care is the latest white paper in the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI’s) Innovation Series. The report is the result of research undertaken by a multi-disciplinary team that included patients and family members and offers clear guidance and an extensive, weighted evidence base in the form of a bibliography and reference list. It is available for free download (as are other white papers in the series) at www.ihi.org/IHI/Results/WhitePapers/.
“Patient Safety: A Consumer’s Perspective” was published online in February by Qualitative Health Research. Written by a research team from Consumers Advancing Patient Safety (CAPS), the article is based on interviews with 21 individuals who attended an international workshop sponsored by CAPS. The authors used a structured research methodology to analyze the transcripts and develop recommendations for improving patient-centeredness and patient safety. The article is available now through the CAPS website, www.patientsafety.org, or through Sage Publications at http://qhr.sagepub.com.
Medically Induced Trauma Support Services (MITSS) held an all-day event in August 2010 to learn more about what members of minority communities experience, know, and feel about medical harm. The white paper Engaging Minority Communities in Safer Healthcare (available for free download at www.mitss.org/EMCISHfinal.pdf) summarizes presentations and learnings from the event and reaffirms MITSS’s committment to engage with minority communities as it helps develop new models for patient, family, and clinician support programs, provider training, and patient awareness efforts.
Organizations working together on healthcare reform in Massachusetts recognized that their initiatives shared a focus on engaging the public. To facilitate those efforts, IHI and a Massachusetts organization called the Partnership for Healthcare Excellence (PHCE) developed A Framework for Personal and Public Engagement in Health, which is available at www.partnershipforhealthcare.org. The authors reviewed the literature and existing models and developed a framework that combines a Plan-Do-Study-Act process of engagement across all dimensions of care: personal experience, clinical microsystems, organizations, and the larger environment (e.g., communities, public health). The framework will be helpful for all organizations working on engagement, not just those in Massachusetts.