Approaches to optimize patient and family engagement in hospital planning and improvement: Qualitative interviews

Abstract

Background Patient engagement (PE) in health‐care planning and improvement is a growing practice. We lack evidence‐based guidance for PE, particularly in hospital settings. This study explored how to optimize PE in hospitals. Methods This study was based on qualitative interviews with individuals in various roles at hospitals with high PE capacity. We asked how patients were engaged, rationale for approaches chosen and solutions for key challenges. We identified themes using content analysis. Results Participants included 40 patient/family advisors, PE managers, clinicians and executives from 9 hospitals (2 < 100 beds, 4 100 + beds, 3 teaching). Hospitals most frequently employed collaboration (standing committees, project teams), followed by blended approaches (collaboration + consultation), and then consultation (surveys, interviews). Those using collaboration emphasized integrating perspectives into decisions; those using consultation emphasized capturing diverse perspectives. Strategies to support engagement included engaging diverse patients, prioritizing what benefits many, matching patients to projects, training patients and health‐care workers, involving a critical volume of patients, requiring at least one patient for quorum, asking involved patients to review outputs, linking PE with the Board of Directors and championing PE by managers, staff and committee/team chairs. Conclusion This research generated insight on concrete approaches and strategies that hospitals can use to optimize PE for planning and improvement. On‐going research is needed to understand how to recruit diverse patients and best balance blended consultation/collaboration approaches. Patient or public contribution Three patient research partners with hospital PE experience informed study objectives and interview questions.

Research on the factors that influence patients with colorectal cancer participating in the prevention and control of surgical site infection: Based on the extended theory of planned behaviour

“…Medical personnel should initiatively communicate with patients, encourage patients to express confusions, consider patients as the cooperative partner. Anderso et al 34 found that cooperative participation will be developed and accepted as a mainstream form of patient participation; therefore, medical staff should also actively pay attention to the desire of patients to participate in information interaction, meet the information needs of patients in a variety of ways and take the initiative to provide patients with disease‐ and treatment‐related information in the process of communication and interaction between medical staff and patients. Different communication skills should be utilized to optimize the communication process, to improve the quality of communication, to ensure that patients correctly understand the information provided on SSI and, with the help of mobile medical technology, to provide patients with continuous and comprehensive information to fully grasp the relevant knowledge.…”

“…Medical personnel should initiatively communicate with patients, encourage patients to express confusions, consider patients as the cooperative partner. Anderso et al 34 found that cooperative participation will be developed and accepted as a mainstream form of patient participation; therefore, medical staff should also actively pay attention to the desire of patients to participate in information interaction, meet the information needs of patients in a variety of ways and take the initiative to provide patients with disease-and treatment-related information in the process of communication and interaction between medical staff and patients.…”

A Systematic Review: The Dimensions utilized in the Performance Evaluation of Healthcare- An Implication during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…As a result, the hospital converted 11 million American dollar losses into four million profits after four years of implementation [25]. Since then, BSC has gained increasing attention, and many HCO in high-income countries and low-and middle-income countries have strategically utilized BSC to develop their organizations [28][29][30][31][32].…”

“…Another review [28] revealed that there had been a lack of engaging stakeholders in BSC implementations, such as engaging patients and HCWs. However, researchers have pointed to the importance of patient and HCW engagement in the process of PE and delivery improvement [29][30][31]. The rest of the BSC reviews [28,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42] focused only on the general narration of the BSC perspectives and subdimensions used.…”

“…Either a part of the customer or the internal perspectives at BSC, while some studies added it under HCWs management perspective [30,48,55,62,67,72]. It consisted of six subdimensions.…”