By embracing patient-centred care, health care has discovered the power of transforming patients into partners.
What exactly is patient-centred care? It’s a healthcare approach that puts patients in control. According to health professionals, patients are empowered, and results improve when they take an active role in their care. Patient-centred care eliminates unnecessary treatments, respects the patient’s wishes, and enhances patient health.
Patient-centred care is tailored to the individual. It enables health providers to develop patient-specific treatment strategies. However, trust is essential between the patient and the practitioner. Gaining trust necessitates excellent leadership abilities and sophisticated knowledge of nursing methods.
An online Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) to Doctor of Nursing Practice program can provide nurse leaders with the knowledge and skills they need to transform healthcare by utilizing cutting-edge techniques such as patient-centred care.
What Exactly Is Patient-Centered Care?
In patient-centred care, health professionals inform, counsel, and support patients as they make health and treatment decisions. Patients do not take orders from their doctors, encouraging them to take an active role in controlling their care.
Patient-centred care considers an individual’s entire being. Patients have feelings, questions, opinions, financial concerns, and families to feel. A patient-centred approach focuses on treating patients as partners and addressing the whole person, a person with unique problems.
A patient-centred approach must have the following components:
Transparency and prompt disclosure of patient health data
Health care providers that work with patients
Physical and mental well-being is prioritized.
Respect for patients and their families viewpoints
Involvement of patients and their families in decision-making
A pleasant environment in care settings for families
Health care institutions that share the same values and aspirations as their patients
Patient-Centred Care Collaboration
Collaboration is essential in patient-centred care. When patients participate in the care delivery process, health professionals can tailor treatment methods to meet the requirements and preferences of the patients.
Traditionally, nurse practitioners treating overweight, diabetic patients could hand out diet programs and exercise regimens while explaining why the adjustments are necessary.
In a patient-centred care approach, nurse practitioners and patients collaborate to identify activities and methods compatible with patients’ lifestyles. Health experts conduct questions to identify personalized approaches to treating their patients’ ailments.
Collaboration fosters trust and rapport, promotes open communication, and assists patients in adhering to treatment plans. It also reduces anxiety. The partnership helps patients better understand their health situations and make more educated decisions.
Collaboration allows health providers to gain a better understanding of their patients. Health professionals help patients achieve their health goals by doing so.
The Patient-Centered Care Holistic Mindset
A holistic approach is an essential component of patient-centred care. The concept addresses patients’ physical comfort needs while considering their emotional well-being. They frequently impact one another.
Health practitioners must recognize that each patient’s situation is unique. Health practitioners can treat patient health issues more successfully by considering their patients’ preferences, cultural traditions, values, and socioeconomic origins.
For example, health experts can collaborate to devise solutions if a patient’s insurance only covers four sessions of physical therapy and the patient cannot afford out-of-pocket charges.
Because patient-centred treatment considers the whole person, it accommodates a patient’s mental, social, cultural, and spiritual viewpoints. This can include respecting the patient’s views about death, pregnancy and delivery, and food. It also entails being aware of historical concerns that cause a group to distrust expert guidance on care.
Goals for Patient-Centered Care and Care Delivery
For patient-centred care to be effective, a facility’s mission, vision, and leadership must all be aligned with a patient-centred approach. The facility evaluates how well health workers collaborate with patients or promote patients’ emotional well-being.
Health care facilities may conduct patient satisfaction surveys or form advisory councils of patients and families to provide helpful feedback. This allows facilities to fine-tune and track their patient-centred treatment strategy.
A patient-centred care approach can also be combined with other delivery methods by health professionals. Evidence-based practice, for example, can complement patient-centred care by combining information from clinical research with the values and preferences of patients to develop care plans.
Value-based buying can also be used to encourage patient-centred treatment. This method ties health care professionals’ pay to the quality of treatment they provide, rewarding providers for delivering better care while holding them more accountable for providing adequate care.
A Quick Overview of Patient and Family-Centered Care
Patient- and family-centred care enables patients to define each family member’s role in their treatment. It is possible to form a natural bond between patients and their families. Why? Patients and their families are the most knowledgeable about what they desire from treatment. Cancer patients, for example, may not want the most severe treatment. They may conclude that the risks outweigh the benefits. Similarly, patients may believe that the financial burden of a procedure with a 50% success probability is unjustified.
Health professionals may honour patients’ and families’ values and desires when they have good, open relationships. For example, a patient with Alzheimer’s disease may be unable to articulate needs upon arrival at a facility. By maintaining open lines of contact with the family, nurse practitioners can keep conscious of the patient’s and family’s wishes for just palliative care or medications to treat delusions.
According to the Institute for Patient- and Family-Centered Care, certain concepts are essential to a patient- and family-centred care approach:
Dignity. Health care providers pay attention to patient and family preferences and incorporate their values and beliefs into their treatment delivery.
Participation. Health professionals encourage and assist patients and families to participate in decision-making actively.
Collaboration. Health professionals collaborate with patients and families to develop treatment strategies.
The exchange of adequate information. Health professionals ensure that patients and families have complete access to health information to make educated decisions.
This approach to care has many advantages:
Patient satisfaction has increased.
improved employee morale
Reduced healthcare costs
Examples of Patient-Centered Care in Action
Health professionals provide patient-centred care in various clinical settings, including nursing homes and rehabilitation institutions, critical care units, emergency rooms, and community health centres.
A gerontological nurse or doctor of nursing practice (DNP) providing patient-centred care, for example, should perform the following:
Create welcoming places.
Encourage social interaction.
Improve patient-provider relationships through open communication.
Examine the notion in action to determine what patient-centred care is. Considering examples of patient-centred treatment sheds light on how patients establish trust. Examples also show why trustworthy relationships between patient and provider make strategic maintenance easier to deliver.
Primary Care with a Patient-Centered Approach
Nurse practitioners, DNPs, and physicians who use a patient-centred care paradigm establish personal ties with patients in primary care. Empathy, eye contact, discourse, and enquiries about a patient’s emotional well-being allow caregivers to build a trusting relationship.
This procedure allows clinicians to examine a patient’s overall needs as well as identify personal difficulties that may be contributing to symptoms.
With this broader perspective on a patient, doctors can provide valuable assistance. Consider the following examples:
A nurse practitioner finds a patient with high blood pressure depressed after engaging them in a dialogue about overall well-being. The nurse practitioner advises a peer support group for persons who have lost loved ones, as well as bereavement counselling choices and referring the patient to a specialist for a cardiac condition.
A patient arrives late for a well-visit and complains of recurrent headaches. The DNP observes that the patient is agitated and frazzled and initiates a chat about the day. The DNP learns that the patient recently lost a job and that the symptoms began soon after. During the visit, the DNP discusses the patient’s favourite stress-relieving hobbies. Because the patient is interested in meditation, the DNP suggests a community centre that offers meditation sessions and job counselling and then makes a follow-up appointment.
Hospital Patient-Centered Care
What exactly is patient-centred care in the hospital? A patient-centred care paradigm in hospitals necessitates health professionals, including patients and their families, in decision-making. Furthermore, hospital rules and design comfort patients and their families while establishing openness, trust, and a sense of cooperation among physicians, patients, and families.
Patients and their families are empowered and supported to the greatest extent feasible in hospitals that use patient-centred care models. Consider the following scenarios:
Instead of limiting who may and cannot visit, patients select who can and cannot see. Patient-centred hospitals invite relatives (as defined by the patient) to visit whenever the patient desires. During shift changes, health providers may ask family members to discuss the patient’s progress and care with the care team.
Maternity wards may be built with rooms explicitly created for the mother, infant, and family members to bond postpartum. During the birthing process, health providers will communicate deliberately with moms and their families to establish trust and confidence. They will also handle cultural problems delicately, such as recognizing requests to keep the umbilical cord, allowing for prayers and blessings, and creating room for spiritual or religious objects. If issues emerge, clinicians will carefully lay out treatment alternatives such as epidurals (pain relief methods) or cesarean sections, and patients and their families will decide.
What Is the Role of the Advanced Practice Registered Nurse in the Patient-Centered Care Model?
Communication is crucial to satisfying the requirements of patients. Advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs), such as certified nurse midwives and clinical nurse specialists, rely on strong interpersonal and communication skills to develop patient-centred care plans.
APRNs must understand that how they communicate information is just as significant as the material itself. APRNs can better care for their patients by sharing with honesty and compassion and using accurate, thorough, and precise information. According to research, strong communication is associated with the following:
Improved patient outcomes
Fewer negative events
Reduced hospital stays
Improved patient comprehension and adherence to treatment plans
APRNs may assist their patients in building care plans that cover pain management, pharmaceutical needs, and follow-up care, among other things, by speaking sensitively, listening carefully, and asking insightful questions.
APRNs not only educate patients about their health and treatment options but also about patient-centred care. They assist patients and families in understanding their roles and rights in care and treatment within the context of a patient-centred care approach. APRNs, for example, inform patients about the following:
Patients have a right to access their health information.
Patients should communicate their preferences to doctors and expect them to be honoured.
Patients have the right to privacy and confidentiality.
Patients can help adapt their treatment to their specific needs and health goals.
Cultural Awareness
Cultural competency is critical for developing trusted partnerships with patients that are important to the patient-centred care approach. Recognizing patients’ ethnic backgrounds and viewpoints is what cultural competency entails. This entails respecting and responding sensitively to patients’ cultures, values, beliefs, and socioeconomic circumstances.
Nurse leaders assist colleagues in reflecting on unconscious or conscious prejudices or preconceptions they may hold and how those perspectives may affect their understanding of patient actions or choices.
Nurse leaders often involve their teams in discussions about race, gender, age, class, gender identity, and other topics relating to their patients. Nurses use this newfound insight to develop patient interactions that respect their patients’ ideas, values, and identities.
Prioritizing Patients
Anxiety is caused by dealing with health issues. On the other hand, strong partnerships between patients and health providers can alleviate some of that fear and improve overall treatment. Patient-centred care is defined by trust, teamwork, and communication.
Everyone gains when patients have a say in their healthcare decisions and understand their treatment plans: health outcomes and patient experience improve, and resources are better allocated. Doctors are confident that they have addressed patient requirements.
Nurse leaders are critical in implementing patient-centred care models in all clinical settings, from hospitals to nursing homes. They can effectively shape the rules and procedures at their facilities if they have the right leadership abilities and advanced practice competence.
A DNP can help aspiring nurse leaders prepare to pursue their professional ambitions. Regis College provides a comprehensive program that educates future nurse leaders on patient care, research methodologies, and policies and procedures. Learn more about how Regis College’s online MSN to DNP program prepares nurses to be leaders in their areas.