“Patient centred care is about treating a person receiving healthcare with dignity and respect and involving them in all decisions (my emphasis) about their health.”

“Patient-centred care is about how healthcare services create and support policies to put healthcare users, not healthcare organisations, at the centre of care.”

Victoria’s Health and Human Services

“Integration of Care places people at the centre of care and enables individuals to access care when and where they need it.”

The NSW Health Strategic Framework for Integration of Care

“Partnerships with consumers exist when consumers are treated with dignity and respect, information is shared with them, and their participation and collaboration is encouraged.”

Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare

We talk a lot now about person centred care.  And increasingly we are designing programs that feature partnerships, collaboration, shared decision making and (dare we say) power sharing between practitioners and consumers.  But how prepared are we for this transformation in service delivery?

In 2017 we surveyed clinicians and consumers attending a Shared Decision Making Masterclass at the NSW Agency for Clinical Innovation.  We were exploring the barriers to the uptake of Shared Decision Making in NSW.  We published the results here:  http://www.publish.csiro.au/AH/AH18138

Our paper concluded that our efforts should focus on workforce skills development, motivation, communication and marketing, service provision and creating receptive work environments.

My core takeaway from the results is that there is a LOT to do.  Despite the regular commitment to the reorientation of our services to a person centric model – we do not have sufficient numbers of either practitioners or consumers who are adequately equipped to “co-produce” effective health care in this manner.

If we are going to make a real difference we need to acknowledge that we are only at the start of our transformation journey. If you are interested in tools and resources that can help you to deliver more person centred care check out these guides and resources:

https://www.aci.health.nsw.gov.au/resources/chronic-care/consumer-enablement/guide

https://www.safetyandquality.gov.au/our-work/patient-and-consumer-centred-care/

There’s lots of reasons for engaging a management consultant.

It may be because you just need a piece of work done fast and well and you don’t have the organisational capacity to turn the job around quickly. You need someone you can trust who will get to know the brief quickly, come up with a process that meets your needs and can implement the plan to deliver your policy, strategy, business case or report on time and budget.

We’ve all been frustrated by bureaucracies. Sometimes you need someone who’s worked inside large organisations to help you to navigate the best possible path to minimise the paper work and red tape (or just do the hard slog of meeting the requirements of the red tape and bureaucracy). Or perhaps you need someone with insight and understanding to develop initiatives that cut through the bureaucratic inertia and can deliver real results.

Example bullet Points below:

• It may be because you just need a piece of work done fast and well and you don’t have the organisational capacity to turn the job around quickly.
• You need someone you can trust who will get to know the brief quickly, come up with a process that meets your needs and can implement the plan to deliver your policy, strategy, business case or report on time and budget.
• We’ve all been frustrated by bureaucracies. Sometimes you need someone who’s worked inside large organisations to help you to navigate the best possible path to minimise the paper work and red tape (or just do the hard slog of meeting the requirements of the red tape and bureaucracy).
• Or perhaps you need someone with insight and understanding to develop initiatives that cut through the bureaucratic inertia and can deliver real results.

On other occasions you may have felt that your negotiations with stakeholders or internal team conversations were going around in circles, that you’re stuck and can’t move the conversation forward so that you have genuine unity of purpose or have made a real decision that will last. That’s when you may need someone with the experience, credibility and tools to work with you and your team to break out of that log jam and make a decision or plan that has authenticity for you and all of your stakeholders.

Maybe your consumers have told you that a particular program or policy just isn’t delivering the change or outcomes that are really needed by them and you are grappling with how to redesign that program or develop a new policy drive real change. A consultant can be a short term member of your team to drive and catalyse that design or improvement process.

Or perhaps your team just doesn’t have the requisite skill set available for a particular piece of policy development, program implementation or review.

CONTACT CHRIS