Tuesday 4 August 2015

We still don't know what patients value

Great systematic review in PLoS One [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4498685/] regarding self-management outcomes. Basically, long term chronic illnesses mean that self-management is crucial, but we don't seem to do enough research about what patients actually value. Great article. My selected highlights are as follows;
"Patients in our review identified that receiving support for self-management which is meaningful and relevant to the context of their lives is an important outcome. However, services often focus upon process driven outcomes, such as length of stay, or change in blood glucose, without necessarily considering the meaningfulness of this for the patient."
"few studies explicitly identified families’ perspectives".

We are left we the interesting problem, of how we can train physicians to better elicit the values of the their patients. Indeed, it begs interesting questions about what values health professionals bring to their work and practice. 




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