By ePatient Dave:
This is a great week for Society of Participatory Management (SPM), for our colleagues at the Stanford Medicine X conference, and for everyone else who's been working for years to shift medicine's
I’m thrilled to say that the BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal, has just released a new article I wrote about the “social movement” aspect of our work, including the rationale for listening to the patient perspective.
Intended for medical audiences around the world, it’s part of a big, 21-article multimedia “Spotlight” supplement that will be in Thursday’s print edition; it was all released online yesterday. Over on the e-patient blog I posted the full list of articles, including the names of other members of our Society for Participatory Medicine who are in this issue. Big participation, big visibility!
This supplement, appearing in one of the world’s top medical journals, may well be the biggest moment yet in the history of our movement. It’s got hours of reading and listening, with contributions from eight countries, if I counted correctly.
Those of you in my generation – the era of many social movements – will relate to the parallels with what’s happening today: a whole class of people whose voice has been considered “not worthy” is speaking up, demonstrating capability, and pushing back when we’re told to “stay in our place.” :-)
Via rob halkes
The new era of health care is to be build around these principles:
- Multidisciplinary connected,
- Integrated,
- participatory care, and,
- eHealth
Participatory care is about patient empowerment, not only by principle but also by effectiveness. And, beyond that, it is also from a finance argument that active, guided, but self-managing patients will lead to better health outcomes and less costs.
Lots of health care systems, governments and payors must reflect to find approaches of development that are constructively aiming at building the new structures of health care with parallel reasonable and attainable efforts in lowering budgets, instead of enforcing costs cuts that initiate panic and non desirable effects.