Patient and Family Engaged Care: An Essential Element of Health Equity.

In this paper, we emphasize and explore health equity as an integral component of a culture of patient and family engaged care (PFEC), rather than an isolated or peripheral outcome. To examine the role of PFEC in addressing health inequities, we build on the 2017 NAM Perspectives discussion paper "Harnessing Evidence and Experience to Change Culture: A Guiding Framework for Patient and Family Engaged Care." Informed by both scientific evidence and the lived experience of patients, their care partners, practitioners, and health system leaders, the paper by Frampton et al.

Improving the patient experience through a comprehensive performance framework to evaluate excellence in person-centred care.

Background: Person-centred care (PCC) is now recognised as an important component of healthcare quality. However, a lack of consensus of its most critical elements and absence of a global measure of person-centredness has limited the ability to evaluate the impact of implementation.

Aim: Introduce a measurable construct for PCC that yields improvement in quality, patient loyalty and staff engagement.

Compassion as the foundation of patient-centered care: the importance of compassion in action.

The Institute of Medicine defines patient-centered care as "providing care that is respectful of, and responsive to, individual patient preferences, needs and values, and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions." What is missing in this definition is an explicit emphasis on compassion. This perspective article draws on the experience of Planetree (CT, USA), a not-for-profit organization that partners with healthcare establishments to drive adoption of patient-centered care principles and practices by connecting healthcare professionals with the voices and perspectives of the patients and family members who utilize their services.

Putting patients first: patient-centered care: more than the sum of its parts.

This is the seventh and last in a series of articles from Planetree, an international non profit organization founded in 1978 that's "committed to improving medical care from the patient's perspective." For more information, go to www.planetree.

Patient-centred care: more than the sum of its parts--Planetree's patient-centred hospital designation programme.

When a nurse at the Celilo Cancer Center at the Mid-Columbia Medical Center in The Dalles, Oregon, found out that his patient was scheduled to receive chemotherapy on her wedding anniversary, he asked the woman and her husband what song they'd first danced to on their wedding day. It was "Save the Last Dance For Me," and the next day, when the couple rose from their chairs after the patient's six-hour infusion, the song began playing. Right there in the infusion area, with their arms around each other, they danced.