How can we join up the jigsaw of healthcare?

Regular visitors to our website will know that many of our healthcare projects involve exploring the experience of people living with chronic health conditions (e.g. Alzheimer's, Kidney Cancer, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Atrial Fibrillation to name a few). Perhaps the most consistent finding we see in our work is the lack of 'joined-up' healthcare - the reality that the experience patients want is often very different from the "care pathway" that individual healthcare providers offer.

What does this mean in practice? Well, for example, a local hospital may only be able to provide some diagnostic services, and have to refer the patient to a specialist hospital elsewhere in the region for further tests and treatment. Outpatient physiotherapy may happen elsewhere, or come with a significant wait period. Community health support at home may be run by a completely different provider, whilst help from patient advocacy groups may offer alternative services. Such fragmentation reduces successful healthcare outcomes.

So we were inspired to see this video presentation which not only added some quantative stats to these same issues that we've seen in our ethnographic studies, but also pointed towards some solutions for how to add connectivity into the healthcare journey.

http://vimeo.com/48445581

This video may not provide all the answers, and we're always conscious that "what good looks like" from a patient perspective includes quality-of-life and success measures that do not always appear in a clinical outcome scorecard.

But if Beryl's products and services can help to distribute patient need data to the RANGE of stakeholders who together make up the actual lived experience of patient healthcare, that would offer a great potential improvement to patient experience.