Beyond Information: Exploring Patients’ Preferences

4 pagesThe Institute of Medicine considers patient-centered care (“care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs and values” 1(p6)) to be a foundation of high-quality health care, along with effectiveness, safety, efficiency, timeliness, and equity. Patient-centered care is empirically based and promotes respect and patient autonomy; it is considered an end in itself, not merely a means to achieve other health outcomes.2 Two parallel efforts have furthered patient-centered care. Shared decision making promotes defining problems, presenting options, and providing high-quality information so patients can participate more actively in care.3 Patient-centered communication promotes healing relationships that elicit and consider patients’ perspectives and understand patients as persons. 2 Both approaches assume that patients can articulate preferences based on stable guiding principles or values. While this may be true in straightforward situations, in novel, unanticipated, and emotionally charged situations, preferences may not be elicited as much as they are constructed—shaped by how information is presented and by the opinions of family, friends, and the media. This Commentary explores how physicians might reconcile the imperative to provide patient-centered care with the complex ways in which clinicians and patients construct preferences

The Iowa Homemaker vol.40, no.4

Is There An American Woman?, Maxwell D. Epstein, page 4 Bounced Any Berries Lately?, Patty Anderson, page 5 Homemaker Visits Dean LeBaron, Ruth Ann Walter, page 6 An Experience in Education, Helen Rank, page 7 Scholars in Saris, Mary Ellen Muckenhirn, page 8 Super Saleswoman, Ellen Molleston, page 10 Blouses White Again, Melva LaFrenz, page 1