AHRQ Launches Campaign to Encourage Patient Involvement in their Care: Download Nursing Leadership Tools to Leverage Patient and Family Involvement to Improve Quality, Safety, and Satisfaction
Involving patients and their families in their care has long been a priority for Kaiser Permanente and in fact having members and their families actively involved across the continuum of care is very much at the heart of our philosophy. The validity of this approach has been recognized by increasing numbers of other healthcare organizations and is now also a priority for regulatory agencies.
The latest example of this is the Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) joint campaign with The Advertising Council aimed at encouraging patients to "take a more proactive role" in their own health care. This national public service campaign was launched to coincide with National Patient Safety Awareness Week, and you may already have seen its content on television, radio, in newspapers and magazines and on the internet. Patients are directed to call a toll-free number or visit www.ahrq.gov/questionsaretheanswer/index.html to access information about getting involved in decisions about their own health care and helping prevent medical errors.
The campaign website features tips for patients such as taking notes during examinations, how to prepare for surgery, what they should know about medical errors, following up on medical test results, and asking providers to clarify instructions. The site allows patients to create their own customized list of questions and provides other resources to inform and engage patients in their care.
As managers, you need to prepare your staff to anticipate a much more informed patient population whose changing attitudes will impact every aspect of the work that involves them and their families. Research has shown that well-informed and engaged patients contribute to better outcomes and can prevent adverse events and care involvement is also key to high family satisfaction scores. But in some ways it also presents a departure from past practices in nursing and as a proactive leader it is important to lay the groundwork now for an even better relationship between caregivers and patients in every unit, department and medical office across Kaiser Permanente.
If you would like to find out more about the latest trends and ideas in leveraging family involvement to improve quality, safety, and satisfaction, you may want to take a look at this toolkit. It is designed to assists nurse leaders in working with patients' families to understand their needs, create an infrastructure to support family-centered care, and train clinicians to communicate effectively with family members. Beginning with a discussion of the impact of family involvement on clinical quality, patient safety, and patient satisfaction, the publication continues with twelve tactics and twelve tools for implementation of new practices.
Please contact us of you have further questions about this or any other nursing leadership-related topic.
The Kaiser Permanente Federation has also developed a very useful on-line resource for training ourselves and others on clinician - patient communications. On this site you will find the "Four Habits Approach to Effective Clinical Communication", a set of guides to build proven skills for structuring highly collaborative interactions with patients and family members.The guides are tailored to nurses, physicians, LPNs, MAs and other caregivers.