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- Issue 47
- Patient-centered care in musculoskeletal practice: key…
Patient-centered care in musculoskeletal practice: key elements to support clinicians to focus on the person
Key Points
- A more positive therapeutic relationship is associated with better clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction and adherence to the management plan.
BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE
Personalized care ensures that people that present with musculoskeletal pain are treated as individuals. The starting point for both assessment and management planning is the question, ‘what matters to you?’. This is increasingly important in healthcare as we look to fully embed the biopsychosocial model within clinical practice.
Personalized care can be referred to by other terms such as individualized care, patient-centered care, or person-centered care. Initiatives exist to help clinicians understand, consider, and apply the underlying principles of personalized care into clinical practice, such as the Personalized Care Institute in the United Kingdom (1).
This paper expands on and articulates the key messages from a focused symposium delivered by the authorship. The authors explain why there is a need for personalized care to be embedded within practice, and acknowledge the challenges experienced by clinicians in applying the principles. Having recognized the need and the challenges, the paper goes on to define 3 key facets of personalized care with the aim to support the transfer of this knowledge into clinical practice.
The cornerstone of effective implementation is communication. There should be a focus not just on what is communicated, but how it is communicated.
1 – ESTABLISHING MEANINGFUL CONNECTION
At the centre of personalized care is the therapeutic relationship. It has been shown that a more positive therapeutic relationship is associated with better clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction and adherence to the management plan. Therefore, clinicians should seek to establish