Abstract
Background: Globally, healthcare organisations are grappling with how to improve patient experience - a vital aspect of care quality. Patients and caregivers can play a critical role in identifying person-centred ways to improve experience. However, organisations tend to only learn from their experiences using a singular approach (e.g., patient experience surveys), do not consistently act on what they learn, or share back the actions they take. This prevents organisations from understanding - and learning from - contextual factors that shape experience; reinforces structural marginalization when members of equity-deserving groups are undersampled and therefore excluded from quality improvement initiatives; and erodes trust when patients/caregivers speak up but do not see improvements.
Approach: Leveraging the expertise of patient and caregiver partners, healthcare leaders and staff, we present building blocks healthcare organisations can implement to learn from the experiences of patients and caregivers to action integrated person-centred care. We held interviews and focus groups with twenty-three patient and caregiver partners, healthcare leaders and staff at a hospital network in Mississauga, Ontario Canada to understand their perspectives on a patient experience data framework developed by our team in response to needs identified by community members and health system leaders. Codebook thematic analysis was used to develop themes.
Results: In this presentation, we present six building blocks for effectively learning from the experiences of patients and caregivers to action integrated person-centred care. Organisations need to:(1) Think about experience holistically through the lens of patients and caregiversPatients and caregivers have healthcare experiences that span health systems. Experience data should be collected throughout the patient journey to provide a more fulsome picture of the drivers of experience.(2) Learn about experience through different ways. Data collection approaches need to be flexible and tailored to patient and caregiver preferences, abilities, and needs. Organisations can use data collected for other purposes to further identify gaps and needs.(3) Everyone has a role to playEveryone should feel supported to take action on experience within the scope of their work. Accountability measures can be leveraged so that improving experience is not overshadowed by other strategic priorities.(4) Engage community stakeholders to prioritise actionOpportunities to improve experience will likely far exceed the human, financial, and infrastructure resources available. Deciding how to prioritise action is not value-neutral - and needs to be decided thoughtfully in concert with community stakeholders.(5) Centre equity so that everyone experiences improveEquity is a cross-cutting theme. Each building block has the potential to promote equity or reinforce inequities, depending on how it is implemented.(6) Show how patient experience is improving. Showing how experiences are being mobilised is critical for building trust between organisations and the people who use their services. Transparency also allows for continuous learning within and across organisations.
Implications:In this presentation we share early learnings from bringing this strategy to a large hospital in a Canadian region serving a diverse population. Next steps include studying applicability in other health settings as well as implementing, sustaining, and adapting the framework components in practice.