Update: Minister’s Patient and Family Advisory Council, Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care
It’s been a while since I have posted, and I am excited to be back on this forum and to share with you what the Minister’s PFAC (or MFPAC) has been up to since I last posted in late March 2018.
First, why the hiatus of 5 months? Well, we’ve had an election here in Ontario and before and during the election I decided to observe a period of disconnecting from the dialogue around patient engagement and patient partnership, while the election process took place. As a Council, we did continue to collaborate and discuss issues about patient experience, patient engagement and patient partnership. As Chair, I continued to work closely with the Ministry leadership to better understand and support effective partnership with patients/families/caregivers in the work they do as well.
I am now at the 1 year mark in my tenure as the inaugural chair of the Minister’s PFAC. I am very pleased to be working with Minister Christine Elliott as the recently appointed Minister of Health and Long Term Care for Ontario. Minister Elliott was previously the Patient Ombudsman for Ontario, and is also someone who cares deeply about the patient experience and patient engagement in healthcare. Both the council members and myself are looking forward to working with her to provide the best advice and guidance from the perspective and experience of patients/families/caregivers across Ontario.
Let me share with you what the Council has been up to…
The Minister’s PFAC meets in person for every few months to discuss key topics and issue areas that they have identified as important to patients/families/caregivers (*I’ll use ‘Patients’ for brevity) across Ontario. As per my updates from November and December 2017,we were just getting things started: https://medium.com/julie-drury/the-ministers-patient-and-family-advisory-council-getting-started-c98f90fba6d3
Since then, the Council has met 3 more times (February, April, and June 2018) and has identified 5 major themes and 8 priority areas that we have focused our work on.
Themes:
Integrated and Coordinated Care
Making parts of the healthcare system work better together. This might mean less organizational silos, organizations working together to ‘wrap’ care around a patient, more effective communication between patients and providers, as well as provider to provider, and effective and safe transitions in care.
System Navigation
Finding your way through the health care system. A similar theme to ‘Integrated and Coordinated Care’, system navigation refers to seamless access to healthcare providers and services. There are far too many access points for patients and multiple Ministries and agencies that patients need to navigate and understand before they can get the care they need. How can we make this easier for patients?
Access to Care and Information
How can we improve our healthcare system to ensure timely access to care and information at the right time for patients? Patients are concerned about many of the challenges facing our healthcare system such as ‘hallway medicine’and capacity of our hospitals, wait times, homecare, and access to primary care physicians. At the same time, patients are excited about the opportunities advances in technology might offer to both patients and providers.
Health Literacy
Health literacy for our Council means providing timely and appropriate education material and support to ensure every patient can partner effectively in their care. Sharing information readily about test results, e-patient portals that provide access to patient health records, material to educate patients about their condition/chronic disease, using electronic medical records to proactively engage patients in their care are all examples of how we can advance health literacy of Ontario.
Patient Partnership
Patients across Ontario want to participate not only in shared decision making about their own health, but more and more patients are stepping into advisory roles to help inform providers, government, healthcare organizations, hospitals etc. about what is important to them and how the policies and programs can more effectively support not only a better healthcare journey, but more effective and efficient care, safer care, and a better patient experience. The Minister’s Council is excited to be part of the patient partnership movement that has become a foundation to how patient care is delivered in Ontario.
Clearly the themes we want to work on are not new and are also have the focus and attention of providers, hospitals, administrators, analysts and bureaucrats across the province. What is important about the Minister’s PFAC and our reach to the broader patient community across the province, is that we bring the patient perspective to the conversation.
Keeping these themes in mind, the Minister’s PFAC has tackled a few key topics already, including: digital health, home and community care, and patient partnership/patient centred care. These are three of the 8 areas we identified in our workplan as key topics we wanted to explore, discuss, and provide advice to the Ministry and the Minister on. The remaining 5 areas for the council include: mental health and addictions, primary care, palliative and end of life care, long term care, health promotion.
What do we do exactly as a Council?
Great question!
Our role is to provide advice to the Ministry and Minister. We play a leadership role in expanding the role of patient partnership across the province. We work in collaboration with 100s of patient advisors across Ontario to bring a broad perspective to the policy and program teams at the Ministry on patient experience, effectiveness, efficiency, patient partnership, patient safety, and more.
We discuss the 5 underlying themes we have identified as foundational to the conversations and topics we discuss as a group. During our meetings, we choose one of our key topics to cover and invite in guests from the Ministry and across the healthcare system to share their insights and offer our advice on the policies and programs in development.
As a Council we have regular teleconference meetings to discuss ongoing issues, and are also engaged across the Ministry into committees and groups that want to further partner on key priority areas. Examples to date include pilot programs on electronic referral processes, new programs and initiatives related to digital health strategies for the province, policy teams that are tackling the topic of home and community care, and engagement to discuss provincial drug strategies.
We are also very excited to have a virtual pool of over 700 patients/families/caregivers from across Ontario who we rely upon to provide ongoing advice and feedback, and who also might partner in specific policy or program conversations to ensure a further spread of patient perspective and insight into the important and ongoing work at the Ministry.
I am looking forward to being able to share with you the impact of our work from both a qualitative and quantitative point of view. We are working closely with an evaluation team to show how patient partnership has real value to many of the conversations, policy discussions, program initiatives and decision making tables of the Ontario healthcare system.
I am looking forward to the coming year in my role as the Minister’s PFAC Chair. It is has been an inspiring experience so far, and I am regularly amazed at the spirit and dedication of our wonderful council.
Patient partnership is no longer something novel to the systemic policy discussions about healthcare provincially or nationally. More and more government, provider organizations, hospitals, and agencies are working with patient advisor leaders and patient and family advisory councils. It has become the norm to include patients in the discussions were decisions are being taken. It’s an exciting time and I thank all of you who are lending your voices and sharing your experiences and valuable insight.
Stay tuned to this blog for further updates on our MFPAC.
Thank you,
Julie
