Patient Safety Awareness Week was observed from March 4 to 10 this year. Patient-Centered Care Month rolls around in the fall. We at Picker Institute are delighted to see these examples of the growing national awareness of the importance and the effectiveness of these concepts, undoubtedly the foremost components of a high-quality healthcare system and ones that the Institute has been working to establish for more than a quarter of a century.
For us, however, the true measure of their success is that they be acknowledged and applied 24/7—or, as some of us old-timers say, around the clock. Every patient-centered project on the books in our programs—Always Events®, Picker Long-Term Care and Picker/Gold GME Challenge Grants— has as part of its goal its seamless absorption into the fabric of the American healthcare system. In this system, the patient is no longer simply the object of the care team’s ministrations but an equal, and sometimes more than equal, partner in their development and deployment.
For better or worse, we live in the age of the expert. There is virtually no topic under the sun that someone, somewhere, has not claimed as an area of expertise.
As a patient, who knows more about your needs and wishes than you? This isn’t to suggest that you undertake the multitude of responsibilities that your care entails. It does mean that the components of your care plan have been assembled with your input and to your satisfaction, that they are based as wholly as possible on your own preferences, that they have been allocated to caregivers that you trust and that you will continue to be the final arbiter of any changes in the plan.
Progress, though slow, is undeniable. Evidence is accumulating that patient-centered care can bring real improvement in patient outcomes. More and more medical institutions—schools, hospitals, nursing homes—are incorporating the principles of patient-centered care into their curricula and their operating plans, and the prospect of the profound culture change that Picker and so many other champions of patient-centered care seek to effect seems always nearer and brighter.
But until the day that the principles of patient- and family-centered care are implicit in every care experience, we must continue to support them publicly in any way we can—24/7,and around the clock too.
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