What we get wrong in Health Care

Providing patient centred care is at the heart of all health professionals care.  This means, we try our hardest to design and provide a service that is safe, quality, respectful and considers your preferences, needs and values.  

It is important you share decisions about your health.  Having access to the correct information to fully understand what is going on helps you make sound informed decisions.  This includes understanding your condition, treatment options, information about the potential risks and benefits of treatments and alternative options.  Then we need to consider how you make decisions and give you what you need to do this according to your style.

However sometimes this is hard to achieve for a multitude of reasons:

• Technology has not been able to deliver usable solutions within healthcare as it has for other industries
• Episodic care: highly specialised teams have innovated due to levels of complexity so one person usually has multiple teams providing care from a variety of settings (inpatient, outpatients, general practice etc) each for a different condition, causing treatment clashes, over testing,
• Communication and sharing of patient information including recommendations, findings, care delivered, follow up requirements can be difficult due to privacy legislation, firewalls, and sheer volume that one has to review for all of your patients
• Patients/clients/consumers live longer with more complex conditions
• General Practitioners are expected to provide overarching care for increasing numbers of people with more diseases, have less time with each patient making getting an appointment when you need one difficult, appointment times shorter, reducing the ability to deliver patient centred care
• Specialty teams are also time poor, and services wrap around them as a scarce resource, rather than the person needing the care
• Treatments become focused on one symptom and end up cause adverse reactions (general effects of that medication on the rest of the body) or not working well with other medications and diseases.