Engaging and empowering people to improve chronic care and patients’ outcomes

Abstract

Background: Person-centred care can have a big impact on the quality of care. Reviews of research about this topic found that offering care in a more person-centred way usually improves outcomes. Some of the most common ways that have shown to improve person-centred care include helping people learn more about their conditions, prompting people to be more engaged in health consultations and training professionals to facilitate care that empowers people to take part. REDISSEC, the Spanish Research Network on Health Services Research, is shedding light on how to incorporate the perspective of the patient in the different phases of the development of interventions to enhance the empowerment of patients with chronic disease, and how to develop a proof of concept of personalized interventions that includes the coordination of different levels of care and the feasibility of its integration into routine clinical practice. Aims and Objectives: The workshop will cover three objectives: 1- Exemplifying, with a number of case studies, the importance of patients’ engagement to improve chronic care and patients’ outcomes. 2- Discussing facilitators and barriers when engaging people in screening and treatment decisions. 3- Raising the current and future challenges when involving patients to develop personalised interventions and for generating meaningful evidence from their perspective. Methodology: This workshop will be composed of four presentations: “Engaging women in breast cancer screening decisions: a proof of concept of personalized screening in a shared decision-making context” The study objective is to develop a proof of concept of personalized screening that includes the coordination of the levels of care and the population-screening program, as well as the feasibility of its integration into routine clinical practice. We will present the study protocol and the results of a pilot study. “Health-related Preferences of Older Patients with Multimorbidity: An Evidence Map How do elderly multimorbid patients prioritize diseases and treatment options?” Exploring the existing body of evidence to identify clusters and gaps. “Enabling professionals to empower patients. Results from a c-RCT of: virtual community of practice on patient empowerment for professionals in primary care” One of the key barriers to the expansion of patient empowerment practices is the professionals’ training and attitudes. The e-MPODERA project aims to address this barrier through a virtual community of practice on patient empowerment for professionals in primary care. We will present the quantitative and qualitative results of the e-MPODERA study (cluster randomised control trial), and we will share the advances of the scaling-up of the intervention. “Generating meaningful evidence for patients and measuring what matters to people: Focus on patients priorities” The aim is to present how to incorporate the perspective of the patient in the different phases of the development of interventions, to enhance the empowerment of patients with chronic diseases (i.e., development of decision aids for shared decision-making), in order to identify the outcome measures and aspects that are most important for patients (offering some examples with our previous experiences in processes of co-creation/co-design of interventions).

Keywords

• health-related preferences
• measures
• patient empowerment
• shared decision making
• virtual community of practice