Patient-centred care in the NHS - A guest blog by Opencast

If you’re involved in the healthcare sector, you’ll know that patient-centred care is a key focus for the NHS across the UK, with evidence showing that involving patients can improve their health outcomes and experience.

And it’s not just a focus for healthcare providers – patients too want to be more involved in their own care. They want to be more involved in decision-making about their health. They want care that is adapted for each of them as individuals.

To succeed with this ambition, and deliver the right digital services and technology to support it, healthcare organisations are working to put the needs of patients and the people who care for them at the heart of the process. But they face pain points along the way, such as:

• Challenges in reaching and communicating with patients to understand their needs
• The complex nature of the NHS, with multiple organisations having very different levels of experience of assessing what patients need
• Privacy concerns meaning that data and information can often not be shared across systems
• Multiple requirements to improve systems and deliver changes that make an impact.

User-centred design (UCD) is essential in helping healthcare organisations to understand what patients and the people that support them need, which is a central aspect in delivering patient-centred care. That’s why Opencast has published its new report, ‘Patient-Centred care in the NHS’, exploring why patient-centred care matters, the current pain points, and how the principles of UCD can help overcome them. The report also looks at examples where this digital change has already succeeded.

The report sets out seven core principles that Opencast sees as essential to the delivery of successful patient-centred care.

If you’re involved in digital health, and want to understand better the context, challenges to delivery, and best approaches to making patient centred care a success, download Opencast’s full report here.

Opencast believes in making life better through the power of people and technology, and we know from experience that insights from users form the foundation for delivering the best solutions. These same insights are also critical to the delivery of truly patient-centred care. Let us know what you think of the report – and please get in touch if you want to discuss.

Written by Paul Malcolm, Opencast director of health