Patient-Centered Healthcare

Patient-centered care is a way of thinking and doing things that see the people using health and social services as equal partners in planning, developing and monitoring care to make sure it meets their needs. It involves knowledge of the individual as the whole person, involving them - and where appropriate their family and friends - in helping to assess their own needs and plan their care.

Patient-centered care has now made it to center stage in discussions of quality. Insurance payments are increasingly linked to the provision of patient-centered care. Los in many of the talks of patient-centered care, however, is the essential and revolutionary meaning of what it means to be patient-centered. The originators of client-centered and patient-centered health care were well aware of the moral implications of their work, which was based on deep respect for patients as unique living beings, and the obligation to care for them on their terms.

There have been concerns that patient-centered care, with its focus on individual needs, might be at odds with an evidence-based approach, which tends to focus on populations. Fortunately, that debate has been laid to rest; proponents of evidence-based medicine now accept that a good outcome must be defined regarding what is meaningful and valuable to the individual patient. Patient-centered care, as does evidence-based medicine, considers both the art and the science.

What has been lacking, since hospital doesn't make margin by teaching but by only caring the patient in the hospital itself, is to have a plan and a strategy to teach the patient to take care of themselves as much as possible. In the social system countries, the patient doesn't go to the emergency room unless it is necessary, they have a physician on call to call instead. They try to modified diet, smoking habits, etc. to be more healthy. The lack of ownership of their health is instead the trademark of US healthcare.

This book advocates that more critical to a true patient-centered system we need to work the basics as well by training the new patients into a better and healthy lifestyle. Educating them to be more self-conscious and offering them the tools to better understand what they need to do to achieve better health and give them protocols and policies to sustain a better life. Prevention has always been the pinnacle of any medical care and should be brought back as a method on which build the new health care for the next century.