Mutual meetings - free online course in person-centred care
Mutual meetings is a digital tool for education in and implementation of person-centred care for all health care and care professionals.
Have you considered developing a person-centred way of working? Then you are not alone. Many health care and care settings, from individual departments to entire municipalities and regions, today have the ambition to start working in a more person-centred way. That is why we at GPCC have launched a completely free online education we have called Mutual meetings. It is a tool for the training and implementation of person-centred care for all occupational groups in health care and care.
- Many people now know about person-centred care, and the question they most often ask us is how to start working in a person-centred way, says Irma Lindström Kjellberg, at GPCC, who is behind the education. That is why we at GPCC have created an educational tool which enables health care settings to train themselves.
A majority of Sweden's regions are working to introduce person-centred care, a partnership between patients, relatives and professionals in healthcare. It is about listening to the patient's narrative, which, together with other examinations, forms the basis for a personal health plan. In this context, the word patient is a collective name for everyone we meet in health care and other forms of care.
Ten group training sessions
Mutual meetings is free to use. The training is conducted in groups of four to six people with mixed skills, like nursing, medical, rehab etc. The group is guided step by step through theory, discussion and exercises, also in their own daily work. The training can be carried out with very simple means. All that is needed is Post-it notes and a place and time for talks and practical exercises.
Issues raised in the training may, for example, be the extent to which employees take into account the patient's expert knowledge of themselves, how well they understand the patient's experiences of their symptoms and how joint care planning is documented.
The three modules of the program - partnership, patient narrative and documentation - comprise a total of ten occasions of 50 minutes each. It is also possible to shorten the training depending on what you want to focus on. Each session is led by someone in the group, either the same person every time or you can alternate.
Shorter hospital stays and greater trust
The transition to person-centred care is sometimes described as a paradigm shift in health care. Research shows that person-centred care can reduce the number of days of care in hospitals, leading to greater trust in healthcare providers.
Text: Margareta Gustafsson Kubista and Jeanette Tenggren Durkan
LINKS:
Mutual meetings course: A training programme in person-centred care
WHO: Framework on integrated, people-centred health services
Evaluation and translations of Mutual meetings
Mutual meetings is being evaluated by researchers at GPCC. Translations of Mutual meetings into French and Portuguese are being developed.