CLAS: Colby Liberal Arts Symposium

Patient-Centered Care

Parker-Reed, SSWAC

Over the last few decades hospitals have made a dramatic change in healthcare towards patient-centered care. Hospitals attempt to focus their resources directly into meeting all of the needs of patients in order to provide immediate care as well as the information and access to future care. Using first-hand research and the ethnographic method, we examine patient-centered care in a Maine hospital and provide analysis of the patient-centered care system there. Barriers to care include limitations of insurance policies, confusion during shift changes, and too many providers, which makes the transfer of vital information slower. This hospital held morning meetings where information on patients was shared, which helped overcome some of the issues regarding the transfer of information. These findings serve as a basis for future research, and allowed us to re-examine our areas of focus, questions to ask, and predicted results. We will continue forward by using our improved methods in other Maine hospitals, and as this project grows hopefully expand research into other hospitals in the new England area. In addition to studying the barriers to patient-centered care within hospitals, we attempt to help each individual hospital where research is conducted by providing solutions to their particular barriers to patient-centered care. This poster examines past research, current findings, and address future work to be done.

https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/clas/2015/program/65