Changing Relationships
Best evidence review
Overview
With the complexity of services increasing and support being fragmented, it is more important than ever that people are equipped to actively manage their care and that services don’t lose the ability to ‘see the person in the patient’. This best evidence review will explore the literature on how the evolving interface between patients and those providing healthcare services is leading to improvements in the quality of care and will also seek to identify what it is exactly about “changing relationships” that works to improve quality of care.
What we’re doing
We have commissioned RAND Europe to summarise the evidence on how activated patients and clinicians working together in partnership can improve the quality of care. These “changing relationships” include for example, approaches to self management, information materials to support shared decision-making, personal health budgets and the use of complaints to drive improvement. That said, this review will focus on the specific interventions that are being tested at scale as part of our Closing the Gap through Changing Relationships programme, including access to online health records and use of peer support workers.
Why we’re doing it
Despite significant developments in recent years, people using health services often find that the support they need is fragmented, services lack the capacity to respond to their individual needs and the responsibility to ‘join up’ services often sits with them rather than those providing the service. We believe that a health system where people have greater control over their care, where services respond to the needs of local communities and where individual interactions are compassionate will result in services that are safer, more effective, equitable and person centred.
This review will help to understand how quality can be improved through “changing relationships” and will highlight where trade-offs between person-centeredness and other domains of quality occur. This learning can then be used to shape government thinking in policy areas such as choice, self-management, and no decision about me without me. It will also help to inform our future programme development at the Health Foundation.
How we’re doing it
The work will first investigate the conceptual and theoretical basis of “changing relationships” between service users and providers, before moving on to explore specific interventions and their likely impacts with regard to improving the quality of care. The review will be undertaken using iterative techniques to identify useful literature combined with a rapid evidence assessment to select relevant published material. A rapid evidence assessment is an accelerated application of the systematic process based on readily available evidence.
When will the findings be available?
Summer 2012
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