Communicating with Compassion: Understanding Patient-Centered Care
Patient-centered care is a healthcare methodology that involves caring for a patient in ways that are meaningful and valuable to the individual.
Also known as ‘person-centered care’, patient-centered care involves having the patient and their families at the center of everything a healthcare professional does. It includes listening to the patient and their family’s care requests, informing them of all care procedures taking place, and involving the patient in building their care plan. Providing comfort and reassurance are also a big part of patient-centered care.
For those completing a degree to become a doctor or a mental health professional, or if you are studying an MSN-PMHNP, patient-centered care is likely a familiar term. As patients become more engaged with the delivery of their care through revolutionary technologies and greater access to information, the mindset towards patient-centered care is heavily shifting from a “nice to have” to a “must have” in healthcare facilities.
Using a wide range of focus groups and published literature, Harvard Medical School, on behalf of Picker Institute and The Commonwealth Fund, defined seven primary dimensions of patient-centered care, which was later expanded to eight. Below we discuss Picker’s Eight Principles of Patient-Centered Care.
1. Respect for the patient’s values, preferences, and needs:
When it comes to creating a health care plan, patients should be involved in any relevant decision-making processes. Individuals will have their own unique values (sometimes cultural), preferences, and needs (often retention of some autonomy), and treating them and their choices with respect and sensitivity is vital in patient-centered care.
2. Coordination and continuity of care:
When faced with a serious disease, illness, or ailment, patients are often dealing with multiple healthcare providers and staff. This can leave them feeling vulnerable and sometimes powerless, so it is important to create a coordination of care that provides consistency when sharing information from all providers, a care plan that is managed similarly by all professionals throughout the treatment, and an expectation that the relationship developed between healthcare workers and the patient will be a relatively consistent experience.
3. Clear information and education:
Patients in a healthcare setting should always receive reliable, prompt information regarding their condition. The information should be accessible, of high quality, and delivered in a way that the patient can clearly understand, to ensure they are not left feeling uninformed, fearful, or confused about their current state of health.
4. Physical and environmental comfort:
Healthcare settings can unfortunately leave people feeling exposed, uncomfortable, and sometimes undignified. Making efforts to attend to a patient’s pain management, desire for privacy, and ensuring they are as comfortable as possible can go a long way to meeting their physical and environmental needs and to providing proper patient care.
5. Providing emotional support:
Experiencing anxiety while dealing with an illness is common and can be just as debilitating as physical ailments. Patient-centered care approaches the need for emotional support holistically, with healthcare professionals needing to demonstrate empathy and respect toward a patient’s situation. Compassion and sensitivity are also vital to providing effective emotional support.
6. Involving family and friends:
Having a strong support system can help a patient on the road to recovery to overall better health and well-being. Involving family and friends in decision-making, recognizing their needs, supporting them as caregivers, and providing accommodations is an important part of ensuring family and friends remain involved in the care process and leaves them also feeling supported.
7. Effective treatment by professionals:
Positive relationships between patients and healthcare professionals are at the heart of patient-centered care. Providing clinically appropriate and effective care that meets their needs and values is important, as is conveying information in a manner the patient can understand. It is also vital that an ongoing treatment and services plan is devised for post-discharge, to ensure the patient continues to be and feel supported.
8. Access to reliable healthcare:
Access to healthcare when required is essential in a high-quality healthcare system, and remains the most recent addition to Picker’s Eight Principles of Patient Care. Access may mean the location of healthcare services, the ease with which appointments can be scheduled, minimal wait times based on the availability of healthcare professionals, and accessibility to specialist services. Fast and easy access to healthcare is important in both emergency and non-emergency situations.
Patient-centered care is widely recognized as the preferred model of care for both patients and healthcare professionals alike, however, it is reliant on extensive feedback from those experiencing it. At a global level, there has been a significant shift towards empowering patients to take an active role in their health care plan, and the patient care model continues to be the embodiment of this thinking.
Maria Khatun Mona is a Founder and Editor of Nursing Exercise Blog. She is a Nursing and Midwifery Expert. Currently she is working as a Registered Nurse at Evercare Hospital, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has great passion in writing different articles on Nursing and Midwifery. Mail her at “maria.mona023@gmail.com”