Involving patients and users of services in quality improvement: what are the benefits?

Abstract

The current interest in involving all members of the health care team in the evaluation and improvement of care has grown to include patients and recipients of care. Although much is written about how important it is to involve patients there is less information available about how this might be achieved. Even the term ‘involvement’ is itself open to various interpretations and this may result in involving patients in quality improvement remaining in the realms of rhetoric rather than reality. In this article we outline the benefits obtained from the active collaboration of patients with health care professionals in making decisions about their care. We examine ways in which patients’ views about the quality of the care that they receive can be heard and suggest that clinical guidelines might be one way of bridging the knowledge gap between health care professionals and patients so that joint decision‐making becomes more effective.

Citation

Duff, L.A., Kelson, M., Marriott, S., Mcintosh, A., Brown, S., Cape, J., Marcus, N. and Traynor, M. (1996), "Involving patients and users of services in quality improvement: what are the benefits?", Journal of Clinical Effectiveness, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 63-67. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb020840