People-Centred Approaches: without direct patient and family engagement in service design, delivery and evaluation

Providing safe, quality and compassionate care is dependent on ensuring that an organisational culture and working environment is truly person-centred (McCormack and McCance 2010). Espousing person-centeredness is one thing, demonstrating you have the evidence that this truly exists in practice to external regulators, professional bodies, patients and families themselves are fraught with difficulties (McSherry and Warr 2010). This is not because the majority of health and social care staff don’t recognise the importance of ensuring patients and families are regarded as equal partners in care (Reed 2011). Multiple factors account for this situation: the growing complexity in the clinical and community environments, where work-loads are increasing, capacity of staff is reducing, complaints and incidences are rising, having time to care is decreasing and the patients illnesses are more complex and demanding.
A mechanism for resolving the above is to embrace patient/user and family engagement as the bedrock of the care processes. The Excellence in Practice Accreditation Scheme (EPAS) (Teesside University 2014) has a ten year history of facilitating and supporting direct user/care involvement in health and social care. The presentation aims to highlight the reality and practicalities of engagement through showcasing various examples from across the health and social care spectrum. Furthermore the challenges of engagement will also be acknowledged and steps for working through these in partnership with patients, families and staff themselves will be provided. Quality can be achieved and demonstrated by direct patient and family engagement through listening, responding and capturing their lived experience. This in turn can be used as evidence of the impact and outcome of patient and family engagement on service improvement and practice development to regulators and professional bodies in the future.
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