Next week is Patient Experience week, where we globally celebrate the people who impact on the patient experience every day. Here, at Melbourne Wellbeing Group, we specifically celebrate our psychologists and speech pathologists, and the support they provide to our clients.
As we spoke about in last week’s post, we believe in creating a connection with our clients so that they are able to nurture a sense of wellbeing within themselves. Our motivation and drive comes from helping our clients with their wellbeing and listening to their feedback. Because we like to work from a patient-centred approach, we believe that the client’s feedback is extremely important in understanding what they need to be able to help them better.
What is a patient-centred approach?
This basically means treating someone who is receiving healthcare with dignity and respect as well as involving them in all decisions about their health. This type of care is also called ‘person-centred care’ and is similar to that of psychologist, Carl Rogers, who used this type of therapy with his clients. The idea is to be non-directive and empathic, and empower and motivate the client in the therapeutic process.
Really, it puts you (as the client) at the ‘centre’ of your own healthcare. We therefore use the following techniques to ensure our clients feel empowered by the process:
Treating our clients with dignity, respect and compassion
Ensuring our clients are looked after even in between appointments
Making sure our clients are given the correct services to meet their health goals
Helping our clients understand and learn about their health as well as the process
Providing our clients with the tools to be able to look after themselves more independently
Of course, involving our clients in all the decisions along the way
Patient experience and feedback:
So how does this relate to feedback and patient experience you may ask… well, if you, as the client are at the centre of your healthcare needs, then we would like to know how we are doing to meet that for you. For us, feedback is important for 4 main reasons:
It’s a way of listening outside of the ‘therapy room’. This gives us the opportunity to listen to not only what you want to work on with yourself, but what we can work on with ourselves
It’s motivating. A client’s feedback can motivate us to do better and work harder to achieve this goal
It helps us learn. It’s one thing to learn skills as a clinician, but to learn what our specific clients want is something else. Learning never stops for anyone!
Finally, it improves performance. We want to know we are performing at our best to help our clients, so the only way we know this is by being told - constructive feedback can do wonders!
We have have now created a client feedback form for our clients to fill out on the computer or in the clinic when they come in. This is one way we are trying to capture our patient’s experience here at Melbourne Wellbeing Group. We are always looking to improve in order to provide our clients with quality care.
Our team at Melbourne Wellbeing Group thrives on promoting the mental health and wellbeing of people of all ages. If you or a loved one need support, you can reach us by giving us a call to make an appointment with one of our team of Psychologists or Speech Pathologists.