Patients Values: the Meaning for Healthcare

Healthcare professionals strive every day to deliver the best possible care for their patients. To achieve this ambition successfully, they have to balance between two worlds; 1) the rapidly evolving world of medical knowledge and technological possibilities, and 2) the individual values, preferences and needs of patients. The blending of these two worlds in daily practice appears to be difficult and not straightforward. Increasing criticism has arisen on the weight of explicit, theoretical knowledge due to the fact that it results in a variety of guidelines and protocols where the relevance of the individual patient is lagging behind. An explanation for this conceptual problem could be an ill-defined understanding of what patient values imply and which specific roles they play in healthcare practice.
This thesis presents the journey of exploring diverse perspectives on the concept of patient values and creates a deeper understanding of them. Patient values can be made explicit through the elements of autonomy, uniqueness, partnership, empowerment, professionalism, compassion and responsiveness. Care providers consider patient values as important but reckon with them implicitly. This thesis also provides insight into how patient values can be used to improve care by using patient experiences as a more objective derivative. In this light, short patient experience measurements (PREMs) have been developed at language level B1. Subsequently, literature has been searched for how the results of PREMs can be used to improve the quality of care. The findings of this thesis must help to give the patient an important input in his own care.