Maxime, Cathy and Dawn think the most important skill for patients is being able to share their patient experience
Transcript
The only skill they need is to be a patient. Essentially every perspective, I feel every perspective as a patient needs to be captured and needs to be respected, and so yeah, it’s not really a skill, but being a patient and just wanting to make a change in your community in the way the healthcare system works.
Certainly communication, being able to express your opinion, good listening skills, reacting to people. But for me the key skill is to be able to express your opinion and to listen to others and reflect in what they say in a pretty concise format. Now you’re giving me lots of opportunity to talk here, but when you only have an hour or an hour and a half with a large group of people, you need to be very concise. You need to be able to express yourself in a positive way even if you’ve had a bad experience. It’s not helpful to anybody to air that, so to try to turn it into positive because that’s how we can make change.
The skills that patients need is really the experience in the system, where they can talk about their experience as well as their perspective of the experience of other patients. I think that when we sometimes run into problems is when the patients don’t feel very comfortable to be part of the team, or they have other priorities in their lives, or other issues that are influencing their ability to participate. I think that in the research environment, we tend to be more factual and to the point when we have meetings and so for some patients they might feel like it’s very business-like and so helping them understand how they can participate on the team. Sometimes I need to in meetings open the door for them to check-in with them during a meeting even, to ask if they have suggestions. So I think there’s a number of different elements that we can – or things that we can do as researchers to help make the process easier for us as a research team, and for patients and family members on the team.
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- Impact on Research – DawnIn Dawn’s project, engaging patients highlighted just how different the perspective of the patient can be from that of health professionals.
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- Supports needed – DawnThe research process, as well as people’s roles and responsibilities, should be explained from the outset. Dawn thinks this would help prepare everyone for engagement.
- Skills for partnership – DawnMaxime, Cathy and Dawn think the most important skill for patients is being able to share their patient experience
- Relationship building – DawnConnecting with patients and learning more about one another has been helpful for Dawn
- Defining partnerships – DawnPatient engagement can evolve into a full partnership, suggests Dawn
- Developing partnerships – DawnDawn’s research team finds patient partners by reaching out to colleagues or support groups