Health Research & Educational Trust, an affiliate of the American Hospital Association, conducted a first-of-its-kind survey of more than 1,400 hospitals across the country to uncover how each practices patient and family engagement. Their findings, published today in the BMJ Quality & Safety Journal, indicate, not surprisingly, that there is a large variation in what hospitals do.
The majority surveyed had written policies on patients' rights to identify which of their personal contacts they would like to have actively involved in their care and a policy for unrestricted visitor access in at least some units (88 and 86 percent, respectively). Unfortunately, the least frequently adopted practices included the involvement of patients and family members as either educators or content developers when training clinical staff (7 percent), patient and family advisory councils meeting within the last 12 months (21 percent), and patient and family members sitting on the patient and family advisory councils (23 percent). Additionally, close to two-thirds (61.9 percent) had no formal assessment of patient and family engagement practices in place.
These and other findings can be read in the full study here.
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