Putting Person Centred Care into Action: Building a New Special Interest Group to Advance a Global Agenda

Health systems globally are striving to advance the quintuple aim of better patient and caregiver experience, better provider experience, better population health, lower cost (or better value for what we spend) and a focus on equity. One of the most neglected and least understood parts of this framework is improving patient and caregiver experience. Person centred care – care that sees a health service user as a full person with individual desires, preferences, and values, and not merely a patient with health conditions to fix – is often heralded as the way to improve experience. Further, recognizing the caregiver (family and friend of the person receiving care) partnering with them and supporting them is fundamental to achieving person centred care. However, there is very little guidance on how to operationalize person centred care into practice. Stemming from a workshop we hosted at the IFIC conference last year, we are in the midst of launching a new International Foundation on Integrated Care (IFIC) Special Interest Group (SIG) called “Actioning Person Centred Care”. We have already started to build our community and existing members have identified the following priority areas: 1) knowledge mobilization on best practices for collecting and using patient and caregiver experience data in practice; 2) conducting research together; and 3) influencing policy, as possible areas of collective action for the SIG. The purpose of this workshop is to mobilize a global community to formalise the strategic objectives of this newly planned SIG and identify collective areas of action for the coming year. The workshop is geared towards community members including patients, caregivers, health and social care providers, managers, leaders, researchers and trainees interested in actioning person centred care. We will mobilize our collective expertise to continue building this SIG. The workshop will be organized as follows: Welcome, menti-meter (what brought you here today)? Where are you joining from?5 mins Actioning Person Centred Care? Why Does this Matter? Short presentation from SIG leads on work to date10 mins Themed break out groups: Priority Setting for the SIG- What will we accomplish in 1 month, 6 months and 12 months? 1)Optimizing Data – how do better collect and action patient and caregiver experience data? 2)Collaborating in research- What topics do we want to dig into? 3)Influencing Policy - how do we mobilize our work for decision makers? 35 mins Report back, vote on priorities, and next steps 40 mins A summary briefing note will be written to summarize action items for 1, 6 and 12 months and shared with participants. The action plan will be revisited each year at the annual IFIC conference to mobilize and sustain this community.