Patient-Centered Care

What is Patient-centered care?

You will often hear us and other health care providers us the term “patient-centered care.” While this may seem self-explanatory not many people truly understand what it means. Patient-centered care is the practice of caring for patients in ways that are meaningful and valuable to the individual patient.  It includes listening to, informing and involving patients in their care. There are three main principles to patient-centered care. They are outlined below:

1. Clinical experience

   This is our job and the job of other health care providers. If something has been shown to work in the past with a similar complaint, we could choose to include that type of treatment in your plan. Similarly, we most likely wouldn’t consider a treatment for your condition if we have found that it did not work in the past. It’s all about finding what works. Clinical experience is what builds a practitioner’s ability to make decisions for their patients. Clinical experience is based on what has worked for the practitioner in the past.

2. Current Literature

   Patient-centered care should always take into consideration what the most current literature says on a topic. This could be staying up to date on different diagnoses, tests and treatment outcomes. This is what                                                                    evidence-informed chiropractors are doing constantly. It is important to adapt to the changing literature                                                                                    and make clinical decisions with it in mind.

   

3. Patient Preference

   Depending on who you ask, this is arguably the most important principle of patient-centered care. A good treatment plan will have your (the patient’s) personal preference in mind. While we will recommend what we believe is the best treatment plan, you are ultimately the one who decides to proceed with the recommended plan. As chiropractors, we have several tools in our tool belt, which means that we can adapt to most preferences and create an effective plan that both you as the patient and the chiropractor can be happy with.

We hope that this helps clarify things. If you have any questions or would like to book an appointment, give us a call at (519) 376-5657 or book online.