PiF sixth annual conference
Meeting the challenges in health information
7 April 2011 – International Convention Centre, Birmingham
The last year has been a turbulent one for everyone working in health, no more so than for health information professionals. A change of Government, a recession, a new White Paper that will fundamentally change the way our health services work and in England talk of an 'Information Revolution.' Shared decision making, choice and quality have been on everyone's agenda.
“Meeting the Challenges in Health Information”, was the sixth annual Patient Information Forum conference, looking at the changes that are taking place in consumer health information and the challenges and opportunities these bring for information producers and providers.
Mark Duman, Chair of PiF, opened the conference by stating his delight at seeing shared decision-making feature as a key element of the coalition Government’s White Paper. But despite this initial rhetoric, little seemed to have been done to effect improvements in consumer health information at the coalface. The Choice agenda focuses too much on hospitals and not on wellbeing and treatment decisions, patients accessing and using their health records remains mainly conceptual, and too little recognition and thus investment is going into the development of information and support for patients on the ground.
Bringing this concern to life, PiF’s first keynote speaker, breast cancer patient Sarah Horton took the 200 strong audience through her 10 stage patient information journey. Praising NHS passion, Sarah bemoaned the fact that systems and procedures are just not set up to inform patients and support them in making difficult choices at times of emotional distress, where rapid decisions are needed.
Christine Connelly, the DH’s Chief Information Officer accepted the challenge and promised that the Information Revolution would open up the floodgates to information for patients. The DH would ‘remove the barriers’ to data publication, ‘publish not polish’ data, and let the market package the information so it would be useful to end users.
Following the DH policy theme, James Kingsland, a GP and National Clinical Commissioning Lead informed the audience that despite the ‘pause’ in the current reform programme, clinical commissioning was still very much on the cards, and that patients had a key role to play in shaping these decisions. David Colin-Thomé, former DH Primary Care Czar agreed and focused on the need for GPs and others, including patients and carers, to view consultations as a “meeting of experts”. High quality information and support, before, during and after the consultation was a key element to support such meetings.
Nick Wooley of Frontier Economics addressed the need to make the business case for information, and took the audience through some of the technical challenges involved in valuing the outcomes, as well as the outputs, of information projects. He also provided examples of where more information about services has been shown to generate savings by enabling healthcare markets to operate more efficiently.
Following the morning break and the opportunity to visit some of the 13 exhibitors, delegates were presented with a wide choice of breakouts to look in more detail at issues around accessibility, including health literacy, digital exclusion and producing information for older people.
After lunch, which included four short ‘Show & Tell’ presentations looking at user involvement in information production, a double plenary session focused on the topic of shared decision making. Steve Laitner outlined how variations in care often stemmed from clinical interests with little relation to local demographics or patient preferences, and highlighted NHS Direct’s work on developing and hosting a number of Patient Decision Aids. Richard Thomson outlined his current work, the MAGIC programme, funded by Health Foundation, looking at the barriers and opportunities to the large scale roll out of shared decision making in clinical practice. Key to this was improved information for patients and clinicians’ reviewing their health communication skills. Afternoon breakouts looked in more detail at shared decision making including sessions on angina education, improving medicines leaflets, and using patient experience to support choice.
The last session of the day saw Peter Cross of the Picker Institute summarizing the evidence that information improves clinical outcomes. This he did drawing on the Picker Institute’s ‘Invest for Engagement’ evidence collection, but also highlighting some of the challenges in making the case – and injecting a note of humour into the end of the afternoon by showing how patients may or may not use the information to hand by describing Bill Clinton’s process of choosing a cardiac surgeon. Geraldine Mynors, PiF’s Development Director, concluded the day by summing up the afternoon and thanking the many people who had made the event possible.
Presentations - Show and Tell sessions on User involvement
- Establishing Readers’ panels – Sue Pickup, Patient Experience Manager , Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
- Running a Citizen and Patient Panel - Philip Hammond, Information and Engagement Coordinator, NHS Salford
- Our amazing Stroke facilitators - Anne-Marie Laverty, Head of Patient Experience, Northumbria Healthcare NHS Trust
Lead sponsor: Merck Sharp & Dohme
Media Partner: Journal of Communication in Healthcare
Page last edited: 06 May 2011
