What Matters to You Day 2024

This blog was originally posted on LinkedIn by Aqua Associate Director, Emma Walker. You can find it here: Emma Walker | LinkedIn.

On global What Matters To You (WMTY) day, we are considering the importance of WMTY and personalised care, and how it can help improve patient outcomes.

“What Matters to You (WMTY)?” is an international person-centred care movement inspired by a 2012 New England Journal of Medicine article, Shared Decision-Making: The Pinnacle of Patient-Centered Care, written by Michael Barry and Susan Edgman-Levitan.

We know that less than 25% of organisations that we surveyed in the North West have personalised care, or the ethos of WMTY highlighted in their quality strategies, and yet only 10% had it explicitly identified as one of their values. We also know that there is a direct correlation between Question 24 in the Inpatient Survey Test and an organisation’s CQC rating.  The more often patients respond that they have been involved in their care the higher their CQC rating. For those organisations that have a commitment in their strategy, is it translating into action?

This makes me reflect on how we should look at things differently to help tackle the challenges that we face. I recently attended an interesting NICE workshop which posed the question – ‘What is the one thing you would do differently?’ – My response was to mandate the inclusion of the patient voice – essentially ‘What Matters To You?’.

I think it would have the potential to:

• Reduce clinical variation (look at the work that NHS Scotland are leading around realistic medicine). At present, we know perfect care does not lead to perfect outcomes because patient values are not included (#WMTY). There is widespread evidence to suggest that including values based practice could reduce costs and improve care – think outcomes and experiences not outputs!
• Promoting a shared responsibility for staying healthy and preventing ill health has always had a potential gain for some populations. The ‘new’ focus on personalised prevention, building on technological advances over the past decade to more easily align data and condition management with AI is an obvious opportunity.  To be really successful it will also have to address the wider determinants of health in terms ‘what matters to you?’ which are far wider reaching than just healthcare.
• Reduce the cost in claims and complaints – we know it costs the NHS approximately £50m per year in ill informed consent claims and 1 in 7 people have decision regret. If we asked patients #WMTY this would significantly reduce these costs.
• Through wider use of social prescribing and health coaching to improve flow and access to different services to support people around #WMTY.

I know there will be people who will say this is too difficult or will take too long, but with no more staff and no more money, the only part of the equation we can change is what is important to the patient #WMTY – surely it’s worth a go? We would  love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

What Matters to You Day is a chance to celebrate putting people at the heart of their care. Here are some stats on how we have been supporting our members and customers to do this over the past year.

 

To find out more about What Matters to You Day, visit: “What matters to you?” Day – 6 June 2024.