Putting Patients First -- What this program is about...

Putting patients first is increasingly coming into the spotlight as an integral part of health practice worldwide. In Queensland, the new 'Blueprint for Better Healthcare' has "putting patients at the centre of all we do” as the first of its six key values.

The reaction of many healthcare professionals to pleas to be more caring and compassionate is dismay or disbelief. In our minds, this is what we already do day-in and day-out!

We all say we put patients first. But do we? In our busy jobs, when we feel stressed, pressured or plain overloaded, we think of our  priorities, pressures or the procedures we need to carry out, and we put these before our patients. We forget to connect. We convince ourselves we haven’t got time to say that little bit extra or do those small acts of kindness that really make a difference and patients remember. This is natural – but it’s not patient- first-focused.

With those daily heavy-duty demands, it’s easy to forget patients aren’t just bundles of symptoms to routinely treat. We don’t consider enough how we come across to patients. We’re not always mindful enough of what we say, how we say it and the impact it has. And for many, it was never in our training.

A patient-first mentality amounts to more than just doing the procedures we’re required to do with consideration, courtesy and respect. That’s proficiency. It’s a basic part of our job – the minimum expected. It’s also easy in the busy-ness of health-care to forget that patients are people who need human understanding, empathy and compassion – and treat them instead with clinical detachment – as bundles of symptoms or captives in a system that puts its own needs over those of patients When we see people as cases, relate to their condition and not them, or worse, just see demands, difficulties or emotional dilemmas we don’t want to deal with – we de-personalise them.  Putting Patients First calls on us to cultivate very important qualities in health-care we call The 3-C’s: Caring, Connecting and Compassion. This clinic explores tools, practices and formulas to help do just that.

Lets Care for Healthcare At our inaugural Let's Care for Healthcare Forum, Bill Cropper will be talking on the role compassion plays in patient-care and stress relief for carers – one of the 3 C's of our Putting Patients First program. If you're interested in on-site personal development programs or patient-first awareness-raising sessions as part of professional development or patient-centred initiatives, contact Bill on 07-4068 7591 to find out how our Putting Patients First programs can help...

What the Putting Patients First clinic covers... We all have different ideas about what patient-centred care is and how to do it. Putting Patients First aims to get people on the same page – to know what it means, what it looks like and most of all, how to act it.  This targeted 1-day clinic centres on 5 Principles for Putting Patients First and a collection of emotional awareness and conversation tools that can help cultivate caring, connecting and compassion.  It is not about clinical or procedural aspects of patient-centred care that are well documented in most healthcare protocols. It picks up on key relational topics of patient-centred care to help you:  Understand and practise ways to apply the 5 essential Principles for Putting Patients First Be more mindful of the impact your own behaviours have on our patient experience of care Identify what gets in the way of putting patients first & reflect on how you come across to patients Manage moods and connect positively with patients Apply formulas to enhance the 3-C’s of putting patients first – caring, connecting, compassion Develop your own action plan for putting patients first

Who can come along to a Putting Patients First clinic? Whether you’re clinical, admin or operational, anyone in health-care from any level or stream can benefit from attending this program.  Leaders and staff – nursing, clinicians, physicians, oral health, allied health, mental health, educators, registrars... private health-care clinics, home support workers, aged care workers...  This clinic will be of benefit if you regularly work in a patient-care environment and want to: Get clear on what patient-first focus really means and what things you can do to improve your patient-first practice Learn some new tools you can apply to enhance the quality and professionalism of patient interactions in your unit Increase mindfulness and personal mastery through adopting more patient-centred principles