Quality Improvement in Healthcare: A Focus on Patient Focused Strategies

Quality Improvement in Healthcare:

A Focus on Patient Focused Strategies

Emmanuel Kumah¹, Samuel E. Ankomah², Samuel Kofi Agyei³, Godfred Otchere⁴

1 Policy, Planning, Monitoring & Evaluation Unit, Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, Kumasi, Ghana.

2 Department of Family Medicine, Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, Kumasi, Ghana.

3 Department of Health Policy, Management and Economics, School of Public Health, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana.

4 Policy, Planning, Monitoring & Evaluation Unit, Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, Kumasi, Ghana.

ababiohemmanuel@gmail.com,  kingkestic@yahoo.com,  sagyei@yahoo.com,  otcheregodfred@gmail.com

Abstract

Health care challenges, such as high prevalence of chronic illness, increasing costs, decreasing resources, rising patient expectations and more complex care episodes, have exposed the inadequacy of the traditional paternalistic approach to quality improvement. Policy makers increasingly believe that the ability to improve the quality of care and control costs will require an effective partnership with informed and engaged patients. Thus, current health systems are shifting toward consumer-centric quality improvement approach, by empowering patients to play a more active role in the planning and delivery of health services. This paper provides knowledge about improving the quality of health care through patient focused strategies. Patient-focused strategies consider the care user as the center for change, or contributing to change into the desired outcome. Strategies to encourage patients to play a more active role in their health care are classified by interventions designed to improve: health literacy, shared decision-making, self-management/self-care, patient safety, access to medical advice, and patient experience of care. The paper focuses, more specifically, on interventions designed to improve self-management and patient experience of care. Given the high-level political commitment to patient empowerment, and the increasing recognition that a high quality health service is the one organized around and responsive to the needs of the people using, the area of patient-focused strategies is likely to receive even greater attention in the future. The research community therefore needs to explore various ways of using patient-focused interventions more effectively in quality improvement at both an individual and a collective level.

Keywords

Quality improvement, patient-focused strategies, patient-centered care, self-management, patient experience, healthcare

URL: https://www.ijbhtm.org/papers-published/ijbhtm-2020-volume-9-issue-1