Abstract
Background: Healthcare transitions are burdensome and involve risk for patients. Improving patients’ experiences of their care journey also improves clinical safety in healthcare transitions. To asses patients’ experiences it may be useful to apply a valid and reliable patient-reported experience measure (PREM).
Learning for audience:
1.Gain in-depth understanding of living healthcare journeys across settings.
2.Understand that flexibility, access and navigation, and kindness are the key to quality care across healthcare settings.
3.See a proposed method for assessment of patient-experienced quality in healthcare transitions.
Research:
•Aims:
oTo explore what is essential for perceived quality of care among Danish patients when being in healthcare transitions across different settings.
oTo develop and test a patient-reported experience measure for patient assessment of transitions in healthcare (PATH).
•Setting: The work took place at two university hospitals in Denmark. Adults were included to reflect the population broadly. This included people living with multiple diseases, older people, younger adults, people with psychiatric disorders, and women who had given birth. The main inclusion criterion was involvement of hospitals, general practitioners, and municipal healthcare.
•Methodology: This work is inspired by Max van Manen’s phenomenology of practice. The PREM development follows the framework suggested by the COSMIN group.
•We have demonstrated that it is possible to capture the complex phenomenon of “living healthcare transitions” quantitatively through PATH. During the next year, PATH will be used for the evaluation of two interventions to improve patient journeys. Preliminary results for these interventions will be presented.
•Sustainability: We have developed a manual for PATH and the PREM is free to use. We wish to collaborate on use and further revision of PATH to ensure the relevance of the PREM and its propagation. The idea is to promote an international consensus on the construct of patient-experienced quality in healthcare transitions, and assessment hereof.
•Through the iterative process of qualitative interviews, development, pilot-testing, and field-testing of PATH we have demonstrated how an understanding of people's lived experiences of healthcare transitions can be scaled to larger population surveys for a quantitative assessment. This will facilitate larger-scale planning and evaluation of improvement projects, supporting implementation research and quality work.
Ethics: According to Danish law, no ethics permissions were required for this study. The study was approved by the legal department at the Research and Innovation Organistion (RIO), University of Southern Denmark (SDU); Notification number 10.953. , and their guidelines were followed along with the ethical principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. All participants were informed about guaranteed anonymity, that they could withdraw consent at any time, and that data handling according to current standards would be kept confidential.