How patients' experiences help institutions to improve care in oncological pathway
Abstract
To improve services, institutions need to listen the patients voice. The patient experience through the health care pathway can help institutions to point out the problems and to learn to design the organization putting the patient at the center of the service. Methods. Focus groups were performed on a group of patients affected by colon rectum neoplasia who had an operation during June-September 2003 in the hospitals located in three geographical districts. It was performed a focus group per district in the period between June and July 2004. Results. Overall patient were interviewed in district A, B and C, respectively. District C included a Universtiy Hospital and a Community Hospital. We choose the focus group technics because of the peculiarity of the studied disease. By a crossed reading of patients' experience we obtained two type of informations: how CORD is working (CORD is the structure which has the role of coordination of oncological pathway, according to the regional guidelines) and which are the strength ness and the weakness of the services delivered by each healthcare unit participating at the study. The patient experience in benchmarking through out different institutions, has been useful for managers to start an internal process of reviewing critical points regarding above all humanization and care coordination along the heath care pathway. Particularly interesting is the case of the University Hospital of Pisa, where the patients indications allowed the institution to reengineering the process, to improve services and empower the communication skills of the physicians and nurses involved in the clinical pathway . Conclusions. Patient point of view in oncological care was an easy tool for improving the health care pathway. It gives to health managers a simple method that allows the organization to evaluate services through the patients eyes .Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.Bibliographic Info
Paper provided by Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna of Pisa, Laboratorio MeS in its series Working Papers with number 200501.Length:
Date of creation: 01 Jan 2005
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:ssf:wpaper:200501
Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.meslab.sssup.it
More information through EDIRC
Related research
Keywords: Focus group; Oncological pathway; Patients’ point of view;References
No references listed on IDEASYou can help add them by filling out this form.
Citations
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ssf:wpaper:200501For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Gaetano Esposito).
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.