Engage PEOPLE WHO ARE patients and the public as co-producers
The
20th Century was the century of the clinician; the 21st century is the century
of the patient.
Social
changes, sometimes summarised as 'consumerism, are correcting the imbalance of power between patients and professionals in every field. The rise of
the internet and the smartphone, making best current knowledge easily available
to patients, is also dealing with information asymmetry - the unbalanced
relationship between the agent and the principal. This is not necessarily easy for clinicians
but it is important to see the patient as a co-producer of high quality and high value healthcare rather than a more assertive consumer.
BVHC Resources
BVHC approaches patient engagement by working with clinicians, healthcare managers and patient organisations in four ways:
1. Educate healthcare services to support people with long-term conditions as the organisers of their care by giving them the resources needed to do so - an approach we first described in 2002 as The Resourceful Patient.
2. Work with healthcare services to allow patients to easily make an input on service improvement and the provision of better care for other patients. Better
Value Healthcare is working directly with IWantGreatCare, an organisation that enables the sharing of patient experiences, to achieve this objective.
3. BVHC is particularly keen to help healthcare provides present high quality information
in a way that patients can understand. To this end, Sir Muir Gray (BVHC's Director) has recently edited a key
book on this topic called Better
Doctors, Better Patients and Better Decisions jointly with
Gerd Gigerenzer, author of Reckoning
with Risk. This book analyses the
changes needed to recognise what is happening at present
(namely a failure of clinicians and health services to compete with less valid sources of information on the internet) and provides solutions for implementation.
4. Engage better with populations. It is essential to engage with the population as a whole because there are many factors other than need that determine referral and self referral. To get maximum value from the resources available it is necessary to include all patients with a particular problem in the focus of a service and not just those who happen to have referred themselves or been referred.
