Opinion piece: We must ensure that patients and staff are at the heart of health and care services as they restart

[Andy]

Bev Fitzsimons, director of the Point of Care Foundation calls on Simon Stevens to ensure patients and staff are at the centre of health services as they reopen in this open letter


Dear Simon Stevens,

Modern health and care can be dehumanising. The volume of activity is industrial in scale. Systems and processes can cause staff and patients alike to feel like cogs in a machine. Problems that existed before the pandemic have, in many cases, been exacerbated during the crisis. We ask you to take the necessary steps to ensure that as services re-start, they do so with humanity and compassion at their heart.

As Tessa Richards and Henry Scowcroft recently noted in The BMJ, “The Covid-19 pandemic saw statutory policy commitments to patient and public involvement (PPI) and shared decision-making in health systems abandoned; the “nothing about us without us” mantra left hanging in the breeze.” As they also notes, it has been “the very groups with the greatest need for care … who have borne the brunt of the covid-19 burden.”

We are deeply concerned that the voice of patients and families in the design of services is being lost. Many services adapted rapidly in the face of covid-19. Understandably, it was often not possible to engage with patients during the immediate response, but in its aftermath, as services re-start, we urge you to ensure time and space is available for service leaders to engage with patients, service users and families.

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/07/2...-of-health-and-care-services-as-they-restart/

 

[Snowdrop]

I just want to put it out there that, in order for this to happen, the stakeholders that have all the power need to at least share power or even relinquish some power.

AND, in order to do that they need to step back from an arrogant attitude of being the one who always knows what to do and how to do it.

 

[rvallee]

We are deeply concerned that the voice of patients in the design of services is being lost

Uhhhh, what? Can't really lose something that was never there.

Even as a disgruntled discriminated patient I recognize that for the most part exclusively physician-designed health care services align with patient needs but patients have never played any role whatsoever in the design of those services. The very notion that they should is often mocked as idiotic, most physicians think non-physicians should play no role whatsoever about anything or even voice anything. Hell, many physicians plainly state patients should not even have the right to complain as it's just plain annoying.

And frankly it's the fact that this obvious fiction is stated as fact that is the very reason why it never happens: you don't have to do something you are already pretending to be doing. This reflects very poorly, I might add. Self-awareness is kind of expected from experts.

I am looking forward to the beginning of this massive transformation but it won't happen until the problem is recognized and this does not bode well. Especially for any BPS-dominated service, this will simply never happen as they actually present cruel gaslighting as "shared decision-making". Freedom truly is slavery.

 

[Arnie Pye]

Hell, many physicians plainly state patients should not even have the right to complain as it's just plain annoying.

Many physicians also hate the fact that patients have access to medical records too. They (the patients) might spot the mistakes, the omissions, and the insults recorded within.