Empowering Better End-of-Life Dementia Care (EMBED-Care): A mixed methods protocol to achieve integrated person-centred care across settings

It is known that the number of people with dementia continues to increase in the world. We also know that people with dementia live to advanced stages of the disease, so they will require comprehensive palliative care. The aim objetive of this work, is to promote a “step change” in care for people with dementia and their carers to enable delivery of timely person-centred care, to identify unmet needs and improve outcomes, including comfort and qualitive of life, towards end of life. Each of six-interdependent work streams (WSs) will deliver new knowledge and sequentially build a complex intervention to improve palliative dementia care.

Providing person-centred care for people with multiple chronic conditions: protocol for a qualitative study incorporating client and staff perspectives

Chronic conditions are associated with over one-third of potentially avoidable hospitalisations. Integrated care programmes aim to help people with chronic conditions to self-manage their health, thus avoiding hospital admissions. While founded on principles of person-centred care, the experiences of people with multiple chronic conditions in integrated care programmes are not widely known. This study explores how person-centred care is incorporated into an integrated care programme for people with multiple chronic conditions.

Suitable Scales; Rethinking Scale for Innovative Integrated Care Governance

For organising person centered care, an important issue is how to deal with scale. This addresses what to organise on what level (in the neighbourhood, local, in the region, or national). With the increasing complexity of organising integrated care in networks, scale issues are an ingredient of integrated care governance. However, there is a lack of empirical studies that treat scale as an object of study in itself. Scale is an outcome of the interplay between many different interests, values and perceptions of people involved in the broader social and political processes. Five factors for suitable scales are discussed, emphasising the relevance for integrated care governance. These factors show, that the classical micro-meso-macro thinking oversimplify reality and more knowledge about suitable scales is required.

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” 

The person centred care game

The game app was developed on behalf of the University of Gothenburg Centre for Person-centred Care (GPCC) in Sweden, a research center that also works to spread knowledge about and to implement person-centred care as an approach in various health care settings around the world.

The app forms a complement to books, articles and lectures for those who want to learn more about person-centred care. After thousands of downloads of the Swedish version of the app, it’s now also available for free in English, from both the App Store and Google Play.

The game is set up as a map, where the user can choose different tasks. The tasks are either mini-games or content that stimulates reflection. The user is also encouraged by the game to test new ideas directly in daily activities and think about the outcome. One example of a mini-game is that the user can meet ...

Person-centred, integrated and pro-active care for multi-morbid elderly with advanced care needs: a propensity score-matched controlled trial

Person-centred care (PCC) focusing on personalised goals and care plans derived from “What matters to you?” has an impact on single disease outcomes, but studies on multi-morbid elderly are lacking. Furthermore, the combination of PCC, Integrated Care (IC) and Pro-active care are widely recognised as desirable for multi-morbid elderly, yet previous studies focus on single components only, leaving synergies unexplored. The effect of a synergistic intervention, which implements 1) Person-centred goal-oriented care driven by “What matters to you?” with 2) IC and 3) pro-active care is unknown.

Goal planning in person-centred care supports older adults receiving case management to attain their health-related goals

Care for older adults should preferably be provided in a person-centred way that includes goal planning. The aim of the present cohort study is to gain an insight into the results of goal planning, in a person-centred care setting for community-living older adults.

What is Important to Older People with Multimorbidity and Their Caregivers? Identifying Attributes of Person Centered Care from the User Perspective

Health systems are striving to design and deliver care that is ‘person centered’—aligned with the needs and preferences of those receiving it; however, it is unclear what older people and their caregivers value in their care. This paper captures attributes of care that are important to older people and their caregivers.

Integrated Care Regulation, Assessment, and Inspection – A Collaborative Learning Journey

Over the past ten years, the design and implementation of integrated health and social care organisations and systems has occurred across several continents. These models of care have implied the adoption of new approaches to their organization and governance. As a result, many countries have begun to focus specifically on the regulation, assessment and inspection of integrated care. This editorial argues that there is both an opportunity and a need to share the successes and challenges from these experiences and to promote methods for collaborative learning.

Coming Problems in Behavioral Health Care

People with serious mental health and substance abuse disorders remain among the most neglected stigmatized in our health and social services systems. Many with profoundi disabilities are impoverished, are unable to work and at risk of homelessness.

Fortunatelly, the  Affordable Care Act (ACA) and expansions and implementation of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity of 2008 provided a significant turning point in addressing these challenges vital to the nation´s health. 

Barriers and facilitators to the implementation of person-centred care in different healthcare contexts

Background

WHO supports Seychelles on People-Centred Care

WHO supported a two day symposium on 15th and 16th of July 2016 in the Seychelles, which aimed to familiarize health care team with the concepts of patient-centred care, and agree on the application of patient-centred care mechanisms, taking cognizance of the Seychelles context. The symposium was attended by 180 participants, drawn from the respective health professions, policy makers in health, patient care groups, and media stakeholders. The facilitation was led by Dr. Delanyo Dovlo, Director of Health Systems and Services in AFRO and included Nuria Toro Polanco from WHO/Geneva Service Delivery team. 

Seychelles ...

4th International Congress of Person Centered Medicine

The 4th International Congress of Person Centered Medicine will be held in Madrid, Spain, from the 7-9 of November 2016, in Campus of the Francisco de Vitoria University. 

The main topics for this congress are:

• Person Centered Medical Education: Need for a new Model
• Role of Humanities and Humanism in Medical Education
• Doctor – Patient Clinical Communication as “core theme” in Humanizing Clinical Practice
• Humanism and Bioethics in Medical Education
• Clinical Simulation in Medical Education
• Person Centered Medicine: Perspective from Healthcare Systems
• Person Centered Medicine: Perspective from Perspective from patients

Deadline for abstracts: September 15, 2016

Preliminary Scientific Program

For more information: Website

Reshaping the workforce to deliver the care patients need

Workforce structure is one of the most difficult things to modulate in health systems. Current transition to new models of care could be a good opportunity to make workforce structure match actual needs of systems and populations. In this report, published by the Nuffield Trust, it is analyzed how organizations could reshape their current workforce and what the benefits would be:

There is a need to evolve from an illness-based system to a patient-centred system.
Workforce should meet future needs by incorporating professionals with a vision aligned with future models of care.
There are opportunities to develop the current workforce at all grades: from redeploying support staff, extending the skills of registered professionals and training advanced practitioners.
There is good evidence that support workers can provide good-quality, patient-focused care as well as reduce the workload of more highly qualified staff. Investment here could provide a cost-effective and rapid solution to ...

Voices on person-centred care

What is person-centred care to a patient, a physician, a nurse, a hospital head of department, an industry representative and a researcher? How do these people, who all have experience of receiving or working with person-centred care, see person-centred care from their perspectives? Short film clips from the University of Gothenburg Centre for Person-centred Care - GPCC. GPCC is an in terdisciplinary research centre, established in January 2010, with the support of the Swedish government's strategic investment in health and care research. Uniquely GPCC has evaluated the effects of person-centred care in controlled studies. This has established that person-centred care is capable of enhancing the efficiency of the care process. Apart from considerable monetary savings resulting from amongst other things shorter hospital stays, significant positive effects from a patient perspective have been seen, as care is adapted to each individual person and his or her resources are made use of.

Voices on person-centred care

What is person-centred care to a patient, a physician, a nurse, a hospital head of department, an industry representative and a researcher? How do these people, who all have experience of receiving or working with person-centred care, see person-centred care from their perspectives? Short film clips from the University of Gothenburg Centre for Person-centred Care - GPCC. GPCC is an in terdisciplinary research centre, established in January 2010, with the support of the Swedish government's strategic investment in health and care research. Uniquely GPCC has evaluated the effects of person-centred care in controlled studies. This has established that person-centred care is capable of enhancing the efficiency of the care process. Apart from considerable monetary savings resulting from amongst other things shorter hospital stays, significant positive effects from a patient perspective have been seen, as care is adapted to each individual person and his or her resources are made use of.

Person-centred care in Europe: a cross-country comparison of health system performance, strategies and structures

In February 2016, the international charity Picker Institute Europe published a policy briefing titled “Person-centred care in Europe: a cross-country comparison of health system performance, strategies and structures”. The document provides an overview of policy and practice relating to person-centred care in England, Italy, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands. The briefing focuses on both quality and efficiency of care and highlights recent innovations and adaptations driven by the rise of noncommunicable diseases and financial challenges. For example, in the Netherlands, models of care have shifted towards both prevention and an increased usage of primary care for handling patients with chronic conditions. In Spain, basic primary care services are available within a 15-minute radius of any place of residence. Moreover,  patients who have received specialist care are referred back to their primary care doctor, who has a comprehensive view of the patient based on the full medical history.  This makes care ...

Medicines optimisation: the safe and effective use of medicines to enable the best possible outcomes

This guideline offers best practice advice on the care of all people who are using medicines and also those who are receiving suboptimal benefit from medicines, from the point of view of NICE based of the best available evidence.

Medicines prevent, treat or manage many illnesses or conditions and are the most common intervention in healthcare. However, it has been estimated that between 30% and 50% of medicines prescribed for long?term conditions are not taken as intended (World Health Organization 2003). This issue is worsened by the growing number of people with long term conditions (long?term condition is defined as 'a condition that cannot, at present, be cured but is controlled by medication and/or other treatment/therapies'). The number of long term conditions a person may have also increases with age, being reported that 25% of people aged over 60 years report having 2 or more long ...