practice partner
DOC TALK
By Stuart Foxman
Engaging your patients
In patient visits, doctors can encourage or discourage care path
illustration by sandy nichols
N
othing about me without me.
That’s a phrase the Canadian
Foundation for Healthcare
Improvement (CFHI) likes to
use when discussing putting patients at the
centre of their care.
In a recent newspaper editorial, Leslee
Thompson, CFHI Chair and also the President and CEO of Kingston General Hospital,
wrote that: “Changing organi“The path may not
zational cultures in health care,
be immediately clear and improving experiences and
outcomes, hinges on patient and
– but it begins with
family engagement.”
good communication, That word, engagement, is all
the rage across the health secempathy and
tor. Hospitals discuss involving
responsiveness”
patients when designing and
delivering health care. Advocacy
groups call on policy-makers and decisionmakers to hear the patient voice. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research says patients
should actively collaborate in planning
research studies and sharing the results. And
in this province, the Ministry of Health and
Long-Term Care and Health Quality Ontario
have talked about making patient engagement
part of the quality agenda.
At the system and institutional level, engaging the public is critical. Those are efforts
beyond the scope of any individual doctor.
Yet patient engagement means something
fundamental too at the frontline level.
A few years ago, the Globe and Mail published an editorial on patient engagement, in
the wake of a Commonwealth Fund survey
that put Canada in the middle of the pack for
patient engagement in primary care. In that
survey, 48% of Canadians said they felt inv