Person-centred care refers to health care that is respectful of and responsive to the preferences, needs and values of service users.
We have developed this resource which runs through why person-centred care is important, activities to promote person-centred care, what organisations and individuals can do, and supporting resources. It also highlights how implementing person-centred care initiatives supports compliance with industry standards.
One of Primary Health Tasmania’s key activities in this area is supporting the use of Person-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) and Person-Reported Experience Measures (PREMs) to better understand how people’s quality of life is affected by health and illness, and to help shape service delivery.
We are keen to see all healthcare providers use information and data received through PROMs and PREMs to embed person-centred care and improve the safety and quality of services.
As a commissioner of health services, we work with our contracted providers to record patient experiences and outcomes.
Person-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs)
Person-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) are questionnaires completed by people who use health services.
They ask for an opinion of how health services and interventions have, over time, affected a person’s quality of life, daily functioning, symptom severity, and other aspects of health which only the receiver of services can know. PROMs can be used to fill gaps in knowledge about outcomes and whether healthcare interventions make a difference to people’s quality of life.
PROMs can be used to:
give a person’s perspective of their health
measure whether an intervention changes quality of life
measure symptoms, distress, anxiety and unmet needs
Person-Reported Experience Measures (PREMs) are another kind of questionnaire completed by people who use health and community services.
They ask for an assessment of how a person experiences and perceives their health care or support. PREMs provide a realistic gauge of a person’s satisfaction with services as well as real-time information for local service improvement.
PREMs can be used to:
measure time spent waiting
understand access to services and ability to navigate services
improve involvement (consumer and carer) in decision making
measure knowledge of care planning and pathways
improve quality of communication
support management of long-term conditions.
PREMS can be collected in a range of ways, including through paper and electronic surveys.
Primary Health Tasmania supports the use of questions from the validated and person-centred Consultation and Relational Empathy (CARE) measure, developed and researched by the departments of general practice at the Glasgow and Edinburgh universities. We have developed an online portal called yoursay.care to assist in the collection of PREMs. Read more about yoursay.care here.
Lived experience engagement
The value of engaging people with lived experience to help design and review healthcare services has been increasingly recognised as a crucial step in developing and delivering person-centred care that is effective, appropriate, accessible and safe.
We engaged Mental Health Lived Experience Tasmania (MHLET) to develop a practical and implementable framework for use by Tasmanian health, community service or primary care organisations. MHLET worked with Health Consumers Tasmania and Mental Health Families and Friends Tasmania in developing the resource.
To increase understanding of structured engagement with lived expertise.
To be a tool for organisations to establish a lived and living experience engagement framework and assess their current practices and policies.
To provide a consistent set of principles and enactors to inform engagement with lived expertise in Tasmania.
This framework can be used by organisations of any size, including those operating only in Tasmania as well as those working more broadly. The most important success factor is a commitment to implement the steps, fostering genuine collaboration with lived expertise, and respectfully working together to deliver a lived expertise framework matched to organisational capacity.
