Guest doctor to speak in Sudbury on partnering with patients for better health care

The chair of Health Quality Ontario says health care professionals should turn to the experts for advice on improving health care: that is, the patients themselves.

Dr. Andreas Laupacis says those receiving care have valuable insights on how to make the system better, but hospitals and doctors often don't think to ask them.

He says hospital boards do their best to try to maintain quality health care and meet their budgets, but they aren't necessarily representative of all the people they serve: namely, visible minorities, Indigenous people and the poor.

In addition to chairing the board for the provincial advisor on quality of health care, Luapacis works in palliative care at St. Michael's in Toronto.

Patients can have surprising insights

To illustrate his point, Laupacis said he spoke with a woman whose mother had ALS. It would take six to seven hours to visit the clinic and be seen by all of the health care professionals. At the end of her life, her mother was in a diaper and she would stop drinking the night before because no one was helping her change her diaper the next day.

"If I was running that clinic," says Laupacis, "I think that story would make me want to sit down with patients and say...first of all is this an unusual circumstance, and if it's not, how could we design the clinic so maybe it meets your mom's needs a little better."

Laupacis says consulting with patients can also steer research priorities. He found that out when he did a cross Canada survey.

Researchers need to consult patients

"A lot of people on dialysis had severe itching and they sort of said, it's a huge problem for us and it turns out we researchers haven't done much research on itching," he says.

"As a doc working in it feels like a place that is bursting at the seams and so adding something else to what busy people are already doing is often not a welcomed in some way," he says, "but I do think we do need to go there."

Laupacis will be speaking about patient involvement and how it could influence HSN's future strategic directions at the cafeteria at Ramsey Lake Health Centre Tuesday night at 7 p.m. and Wednesday morning at 7 a.m. and it's open to the public.