Category Archives: Patient Engagement

Will Any Patient Advisor Do?

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cog

In her blog post, Alies Maybee explores whether patient advisors are interchangeable entities – not unlike a cog in a wheel. Can patient advisors move from role to role and be seamlessly substituted for one another? Are patient advisors swappable? A portion of what she quickly discovers is found below.

As I’ve come to know some of my fellow advisors, I have concluded that in terms of skills, attributes and experience related to the business of advising, we are not all the same.

As advisors, we sometimes assess our involvement and our experience of a group differently. I venture to suggest this is in part because we are different types of advisors. Sometimes it’s like we weren’t all at the same party.

Our healthcare partners don’t often see our experience of involvement in the same way we do. Not only that, I sense they may make an assumption that all advisors experience the involvement in the same way.

My hope is that understanding the different types of advisors will bring a new level of clarity to how we choose to interact and assess those interactions.

Click here to continue reading.

Seeking Your Input on the Nursing Home Legislation

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Open house
Alberta Health is seeking your input on Nursing Home Legislation. Discussion topics will focus on care providers, eligibility, social and leisure activities and meal requirements. Click on the above image for more details.

Patient/Family Partners Wanted

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Are you a Patient Family Partner in Canada? If so, you are invited to join a focus group or interview in person (Vancouver) or via telephone or webinar. To find out more about this exciting opportunity, click on the image below.

Call for Patient Family Partners

Please Note: The deadline to express your interest in participating in this project is May 31, 2016.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words?

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Have you ever found yourself at a medical appointment trying desperately to explain to your physician what and how you are feeling? Unfortunately, no matter how hard you try, nothing you are saying is coming out right and any utterances you make are not conveying the message you want. Rather than struggling to verbalize your thoughts, why not draw them instead? This idea is explored in Damien Pollard’s article Magic Eyes.

Call For Participants

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Call for participants
If you are or know of someone who is:

  • Over the age of 65;
  • Live in Alberta;
  • Have an annual household income of less than $50,000;
  • Have a high risk of a cardiovascular event based on having ONE of the following:Previous heart attack or stroke, chronic kidney disease, heart failure OR Any TWO of the following:Diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, current cigarette smoking (greater than half a pack a day)

this may be of interest to you.

Researchers at the University of Calgary are looking for 5000 low-income seniors to participate in a study that will focus on managing chronic disease. To find out more and how you can get involved, click here.

Stop Kicking the Cat

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According to David Gilbert, author of the Future Patient Blog, there is an opportunity to make radical changes in the area of healthcare. This requires that people, including patients and the general public, are given their rightful responsibilities and accountability. Gilbert maintains that patients can help to improve the healthcare system. However, for this to occur, the manner in which patients are viewed, treated and the understanding and approach of patient engagement must be changed.

We do not live in normal healthcare times of course. The pressures on healthcare delivery in a changing society seem not be accompanied by any coherent vision of how to cope with those changes. The desperation for a new sense of order and the tendency to kick the cat seems actually to be increasing. Though national agencies may talk of letting go, the sense of grip and pressure felt at a local level is intense. Polarisation and power battles are inevitable.

I believe that patients can help.

Patients can be true partners for improvement and change. They can help identify what matters, rethink problems, generate solutions, model better relationships, promote better decisions and improve practice. (see, The Seven Things That Patients Bring). But, at the moment we are all hamstrung by bad habits.

The way we think about patients’ contributions is stuck in a time warp, our mindset constrained by an outmoded view of what patients can bring (or cannot). Moreover, the way we do patient and public engagement is not working – it fails to have any real impact because it is outmoded and unfit for purpose. In part, it was never designed to bring real change, but to buffer it and maintain the status quo. Now, if we really want solutions to our current healthcare challenges, this all needs to change.

Click here to read the article.

Is Patient Engagement Tokenism?

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Patient engagement is a term that is commonly used in the healthcare sector. However, what does patient engagement mean? Does patient engagement mean sitting on a committee and doing nothing more than rubber stamping decisions that were made elsewhere? Is patient engagement mere tokenism?  If not, what is patient engagement and how is it promoted, facilitated and supported?

In the article, “Beyond tokenism: How hospitals are getting more out of patient engagement,” Wendy Glauser, Michelle Satsiuk and Debra Bournes explore these and other ideas.