"Patients can improve healthcare: it’s time to take partnership seriously." BMJ 2013;346:f2614 - BMJ Publishing Group Ltd 2013
One of the possibilities to improve healthcare is the partnership between clinicians and patients, to better understand the daily life of each patient who lives his disease. The alliance becomes therapeutic if signed as a tailored medicine, personalized in the treatment and in the best welcome for that patient, with the aim of identifying what can improve, but also what can worsen. Understanding a real need means knowing the real conditions and the services that could be better co-created to help.
Partnership is a tool to define materials that help patients have conversations with their clinicians and allow them to ask questions about which tests and treatments are right for them. The main work is to choose innovation and cultural change wisely. Because it is always a question of culture, especially in patient affairs.
The partnership with patients should not be an advertisement to enhance healthcare performance, but rather a mean to improve the therapeutic alliance and therefore access to the patient journey.
Healthcare expertise are in clinical practice, but also in collaborating with patient associations and and the communities they represent.
This revolution demands active participation in designing and implementing new policies, systems and services as well as in clinical decision-making.
Partnership means standing alongside the patient experiences who live diseases firsthand. and this experience often differs from physicians' perceptions, revealing a frequent and different moods.
We can no longer think of differences in patient care, communication with the doctor rather than a dedicated team. Partnership also means sharing with each referent of the care of that patient.
It is right to talk about empowerment of each single stakeholder as a means to ensure the correct care pathway, thereby avoiding the risk of inappropriateness and promoting care that is agreed upon together.
We could talk about leadership of both scientific societies and informed patient organizations as a driverdriving tool to establish the credibility and reliability of participation in research and healthcare.
It was already being discussed 20 years ago, but now it's truly time for Patient Affairs… or rather, for Patient Partnership.
Source: BMJ 2013;346:f2614 doi: 10.1136/bmj.f2614 (Published 14 May 2013)