Measurement of the Patient Experience: Clarifying Facts, Myths, and Approaches

The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey is a 32-item tool administered after discharge to a random sample of adult inpatients, creating standardized, publicly reported metrics that allow fair comparisons of patient experience in hospitals across the nation.

The 11 HCAHPS measures derived from the survey reported on the Hospital Compare website assess how well nurses and physicians communicate with patients, how responsive hospital staff are to patients’ needs, how well hospital staff help patients manage pain, how well the staff communicates with patients about new medicines, whether key information is provided at discharge, how smoothly the transition to the posthospital setting is made, how clean and quiet are the patients’ rooms, what is the hospital’s overall rating, and whether the patient would recommend the hospital.

HCAHPS resides in the public domain and accommodates customized supplemental items that are not reviewed or endorsed by the ...

Integrated care for patients and populations: Improving outcomes by working together

This report examines:

- The case for integrated care

- What current barriers to integrated care need to be overcome and how

- What the Department of Health can do to provide a supporting framework to enable integrated care to flourish

- Options for a practical and technical support to those implementing integrated care, including approaches to evaluatin its impact 

The report asserts that developing integrated care should assume the same priority over the nect decade as reducing waiting times had during the last. The report makes a constructive contribution to the debate about integrated care and will be of interest to policy-makers, health and social care commissioners, and researchers with an interest in integrated care, as well as to health and social care organisations. 

People powered primary care: learning from Halton

A community-centred approach to health called Community Wellbeing Practices (CWP) is being to patients at all 17 GP Practices in Halton in order to respond more appropriately to patients´social needs which are often an underlying reason for their presentation at primary care services. 

The patient perspective in health care networks

Health care organization is entering a new age. Focus is increasingly shifting from individual health care institutions to interorganizational collaboration and health care networks. Much hope is set on such networks which have been argued to improve economic efficiency and quality of care. However, this does not automatically mean they are always ethically justified. A relevant question that remains is what ethical obligations or duties one can ascribe to these networks especially because networks involve many risks. Due to their often amorphous and complex structure, collective responsibility and accountability may increase while individual responsibility goes down

Patient vs. Community Engagement: Emerging Issues

The value proposition of including patients at each step of the research process is that patient perspectives and preferences can have a positive impact on both the science and the outcomes of comparative effectiveness research. How to accomplish engagement and the extent to which approaches to community engagement inform strategies for effective engagement need to be examined to address conducting and accelerating comparative effectiveness research.
The objective was to examine how various perspectives and diverse training lead investigators and patients to conflicting positions on how best to advance engagement.

The Patient Experience of Integrated Care Scale: A Validation Study among Patients with Chronic Conditions Seen in Primary Care.

Valid and comprehensive instruments to measure integrated care are required to capture patient experience and improve quality of patient care. This study aimed to validate the Patient Experience of Integrated Care Scale (PEICS), among patients with chronic conditions seen in primary care.

Patient centred care for multimorbidity improves patient experience, but quality of life is unchanged

The UK has an ageing population. A 2018 study of multimorbidity in England found that 54% of people over 65 had multimorbidity in 2015. This is expected to rise to 68% by 2035, with 17% of people over 65 expected to have four or more conditions. National guidelines tend to focus on single conditions. People with multimorbidity may have their conditions managed individually without due consideration of the overall burden of their diseases and treatments. Recognition of this prompted the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and other international organisations to develop guidelines on managing multimorbidity. These focus on regular comprehensive review of the person’s health and circumstances. This trial assessed a care model that incorporated all strategies recommended by guidelines.

Self-management support for chronic disease in primary care: frequency of patient self-management problems and patient reported priorities, and alignment with ultimate behavior goal selection

To enable delivery of high quality patient-centered care, as well as to allow primary care health systems to allocate appropriate resources that align with patients’ identified self-management problems (SM-Problems) and priorities (SM-Priorities), a practical, systematic method for assessing self-management needs and priorities is needed. In this current report, are present the patient reported data generated from Connection to Health (CTH), to identify the frequency of patients’ reported SM-Problems and SM-Priorities; and examine the degree of alignment between patient SM-Priorities and the ultimate Patient-Healthcare team member selected Behavioral Goal.

Care Redesign Survey: To Improve Chronic Disease Care, Change the Payment Model

Many health care organizations are reasonably effective in treating chronic diseases, but they are limited from doing better by fee-for-service payment, which remains the predominant payment model in the United States. The latest NEJM Catalyst Insights Council report serves as a snapshot in time, showing the intent of health care providers to be proactive in treating chronic disease, but limitations in their ability to address population health

Integrated care for healthcare sustainability for patients living with rare diseases

The increasingly complex and multidimensional care request, combined with the presence of increasingly aware and demanding patients, accentuates the need for new strategies to preserve health systems economic sustainability. Therefore, integration mechanisms reveal an essential condition for ensuring continuity of care. The paper reviews the main literature available on the integration of heal services and relates it to rare diseases.

The literature identifies several system levers for the effective design and implementation of integrated care frameworks, namely: political support and commitment, governance, stakeholder engagement, organisational change, leadership, collaboration and trust, workforce education and training, patient empowerment, financing and incentives, ICT infrastructure and solutions, monitoring and evaluation system.

Patient- and Family-Centered Care Coordination: A Framework for Integrating Care for Children and Youth Across Multiple Systems

Understanding a care coordination framework, its functions, and its effects on children and families is critical for patients and families themselves, as well as for pediatricians, pediatric medical subspecialists/surgical specialists, and anyone providing services to children and families. Care coordination is an essential element of a transformed American health care delivery system that emphasizes optimal quality and cost outcomes, addresses family-centered care, and calls for partnership across various settings and communities. High-quality, cost-effective health care requires that the delivery system include elements for the provision of services supporting the coordination of care across settings and professionals

Non-communicable diseases in sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review of large cohort studies

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) cause a large and growing burden of morbidity and mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. Prospective cohort studies are key to study multiple risk factors and chronic diseases and are crucial to our understanding of the burden, aetiology and prognosis of NCDs in SSA. The aim of this study was to identify the level of research output on NCDs and their risk factors collected by cohorts in SSA.

Patient-Centered Care: An Examination of Provider–Patient Communication Over Time

The aim was to examine the quality of provider communication over time considering the increasing emphasis on patient-centered care (PCC). Patient-centered care has been shown to have a positive impact on health outcomes, care experiences, quality-of-life, as well as decreased costs. Given this emphasis, it expect that provider–patient communication has improved over time.

Launch of online training in person-centred care

A free online training course in person-centred care in English is now being launched. The purpose is to give health care sector staff tools to help themselves to start working in a person-centred way.

Globally there is a strong trend towards more person-centred care, involving a partnership between the patient, the patient’s family and the care professionals. Person-centred care means listening to the patient’s own narrative and using it alongside other examinations and tests as the basis for a health plan.

Irma Lindström Kjellberg, Senior Adviser at the University of Gothenburg Centre för Person-Centred Care, GPCC in Sweden, who has created the course, says: “This is about the patient’s role as a partner, how staff and patients make agreements, and how to document them in a health plan” 

Political struggles for a universal health system in Brazil: successes and limits in the reduction of inequalities

Brazil is a populous high/middle-income country, characterized by deep economic and social inequalities. Like most other Latin American nations, Brazil constructed a health system that included, on the one hand, public health programs and, on the other, social insurance healthcare for those working in the formal sector. This study analyzes the political struggles surrounding the implementation of a universal health system from the mid-1980s to the present, and their effects on selected health indicators, focusing on the relevant international and national contexts, political agendas, government orientations and actors.

Mapping Evidence of Patients’ Experiences in Integrated Care Settings: A Protocol for a Scoping Review

Integrated care (IC) models have emerged to address gaps in care for individuals with complex healthcare needs. Although the clinical and cost-effectiveness of IC models are well-established, the understanding of whether IC models facilitate a patient-centred care experience from the patients’ perspective is not well understood. This scoping review aims to comprehensively map the literature to provide a broad overview of patients’ experiences in IC settings with a focus on the experiences of complex patients with comorbid mental and physical illnesses. It also aims to describe current gaps identified in the literature in our understanding of aspects of care that are often unrecognised.

Using an evidence-based safety approach to develop China’s road safety strategies

Road accidents are a major global public safety and health problem. Presently, many countries such as China urgently need to find better strategies to improve their road safety. This paper has two key objectives, which are: (i) to propose potential solutions to improve China’s road safety, and (ii) to provide China and other countries with helpful evidence for their future road safety.

Mapping family integrated care practices in the neonatal units across the UK

Family integrated care (FIC), where parents are empowered through structured training to form an important component of the caregiving team, is fast becoming the standard of care across neonatal units in the UK. The Parents of Preterm Infants (POPPY) survey in 20101 found variability of practice and inadequate facilities to support even family centred care (FCC). To explore the change in the parental participatory model in the neonatal unit over the last 8 years, this article designed and conducted an online questionnaire survey. The aim was to explore current practice, understanding and strategy for FIC using the Qualtrics web assessment toolkit (Qualtrics, Provo, Utah, USA).

Can Organisational Culture of Teams Be a Lever for Integrating Care? An Exploratory Study

Organisational culture is believed to be an important facilitator for better integrated care, yet how organisational culture impacts integrated care remains underspecified. In an exploratory study, we assessed the relationship between organisational culture in primary care centres as perceived by primary care teams and patient-perceived levels of integrated care

Challenges in Implementing Integrated Care in Central and Eastern Europe – Experience of Poland

During their transition, Central and Eastern European countries’ health and social care systems have undergone significant changes, and are currently dealing with serious problems of disintegration, coordination, and a lack of control over the market environment, especially for meeting patients’ needs. The increased health and social needs related to the ageing society and epidemiological patterns in these countries also require increased funding, reformation of rationing, sectors to be integrated (the managed care approach), and the development of an analytical information base for surveillance of new health and social care solutions.