Person-centred care

Governing bodies, managers and clinical leaders all have a role to play in developing and supporting person-centred care within their healthcare organisations.

• Fact sheet 9 - Attributes - Supporting person-centred attributes in your healthcare organisation
  The role of governing bodies in leading, monitoring and ensuring organisational accountability for the delivery of person-centred care
• Fact sheet 10 - Attributes - Supporting person-centred attributes in your healthcare organisation
  The role of managers in leading and coordinating the workforce, and implementing well-designed systems and strategies to achieve person-centred care

• National Model Clinical Governance Framework
  A consistent national framework for clinical governance, based on the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards

Consumer engagement can help to support person-centred care by identifying aspects of care that are important to consumers and opportunities for improvement in your organisation.

• Partnering with Consumers: A guide for consumers
  This guide for consumers explores working in partnership with health services to make improvements to the safety and quality of healthcare
• Engaging with consumers, carers and the community
  A practical guide and resources to support consumer engagement
• Guide to patient and family engagement in hospital quality and safety
  Resource to help hospitals work as partners with patients and families to improve quality and safety

Evaluation and monitoring are critical aspects of quality improvement. To evaluate person-centred care, it is important to assess performance from both an organisation and patient viewpoint. 

Evaluations by the organisation

Organisations as a whole or specific departments can assess their performance in person-centred care. Use our self-assessment tool to assess your organisation’s performance and start to plan change.

Our User Guide for Measuring and Evaluating Partnering with Consumers provides advice on monitoring, implementing and reporting on consumer partnerships. 

Evaluations by patients

Feedback from patients provides a direct measure of how well healthcare organisations are delivering person-centred care.

You can use the Australian Hospital Patient Experience Question Set (AHPEQS) to gather feedback or explore other tools we have to support measuring experiences and health outcomes from a patient’s perspective. 

Staff wellbeing and teamwork as part of person-centred care

Staff wellbeing and teamwork can help to support effective person-centred care. Research shows that patient experiences are better when healthcare staff feel they have a good working environment, low emotional exhaustion, and support from their coworkers and managers.

To succeed, a person-centred approach should also address the staff experience, because the staff's ability and inclination to care effectively for patients is compromised if they do not feel cared for themselves.

Both individual wellbeing and effective teamwork are important in health care.

• Clinician Well-Being Knowledge hub
  Sharing knowledge to combat clinician burnout
• Improving clinical communication, collaboration and teamwork in Australian health services
  A scoping study undertaken to improve understanding of how Australian health services support clinical communication, collaboration and teamwork
• Implement Teamwork and Communication module
  A learning module to help you identify barriers to communication
• Teamwork Toolkit
  Resources and tools that support a partnership approach which values the needs of both staff and patients to achieve safe, high quality person-centred care 

Patient safety as part of person-centred care

The principles of person-centred care can help to support patient safety. The communication, culture and systems within healthcare organisations all play a role in fostering patient safety.

• Patient safety culture
  Information and a toolkit to assess your organisations’ patient safety culture
• Safety Fundamentals for Person Centred Communication
  Key resources for healthcare staff and teams to support patient safety
• Shared Transfer of Care
  eLearning course to help health professionals improve the quality of transfers of care
• Patient Safety Leadership WalkRounds
  A tool for effective clinical rounds 

Supporting consumer diversity and equity

Person-centred care must recognise and respect individual needs, beliefs and culture. Understanding the diversity of consumers seen in your organisation can help you design systems that support staff to better meet their needs.

Person-centred care is particularly important among populations who experience inequality, such as First Nations people, older people, people living with disability, and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds or rural and remote areas. For many of these people, communication and collaboration with health professionals can be difficult. They may need additional support from carers, friends, family, spiritual and pastoral advisers, or the broader community. Person-centred care principles and approaches are an opportunity towards addressing the inequity these populations can experience.

• Meeting the healthcare needs of diverse populations
  A report that provides a framework to develop and implement practices that meet diverse patient needs
• Health translations
  A free library of Australian multilingual health and wellbeing information
• Finding good health information online
  Guidance and translations that support finding good health information online
• Australian Charter of Healthcare Rights resources
  Information about patient rights in different languages and formats