Being healthy is crucial for a productive population. Efforts to provide quality, reliable, and affordable medical care are in most cases directed to the whole family. International bodies, national governments, and different medical institutions have adopted different methods of promoting health among community members.
However, the globe has not yet attained a disease-free status. When developing the different methods of improving medical care services, there has been the introduction of a Patient and Family Centred Care strategy to promote medical care services provision. Patient and Family Centred Care has been a success; it has given the field satisfactory results. Despite the results, the model of medical care provider is faced with numerous challenges that limit its reliability and effectiveness. This paper looks into the importance of Patient and Family Centred Care and the issues or problems regarding this initiative in a healthcare setting.
Patient and Family Centred Care
The model of offering medication involves the family setting in supporting patients to facilitate their recovery; the method gives “child’s primary source of strength, support and well being” (Eisler, 2011). When someone is sick and probably has been released from a medical facility, there is a need for support, in the sense of psychological, emotional, and sometimes physical.
Importance of Patient and Family Centred Care
With the setting of the model of medical care service, patients get a chance to receive services and assistance from those people that they are close to and whom they trust. With the trust and support, they are able to recover fast. Patient and Family Centred Care widens the scope of medical care providers to include the larger family, this acts as a shift of responsibility where every person closely oriented with the patient is given the mandate of taking care of the patient. This creates accountability, reliability, and makes the patient recover fast especially in those diseases that are psychological in nature.
When adopting Patient and Family Centred Care, medical care facilities are decongested, their main work that they used to do involving handling large masses of people, is transferred to the family setting. This assists them to have time for other critical areas in the medical care field. There are some diseases on the other hand that calls for more management than professional medical care practitioner to handle them; when someone is suffering such diseases, the family setting offers an ample place where he can get assistance.
Before releasing a patient to the family/parents, the medics take their time and explain the condition of the recovering patient. This sharing of information is a form of education that the local people get and assist them in checking their future systems for a better society. The education that family members get from the medics assists them in learning how they can make their living better for the good of the community.
In some instances, it’s important that patients live with their close relatives, friends, this happens mostly in the case of terminal diseases. With the time they spend, they can discover numerous elements about each other and facilitate fast recovery and in some instances when the patients die, they might have confided in the family member. To the family, it’s also important and advantageous in that they get time to spend the challenging moments with their patients and seek to improve them or improve their conditions.
When patients are handled from home, medical care services facilities are not constrained creating space for other medical conditions to be handled at close range. When medical care services facilities are not constrained, the costs of medication are lower; this meets the requirement of reliable, efficient and affordable medical care services (Pollock-Robinson, 2009).
Challenges/problem of Patient and Family Centred Care
One challenge that Patient and Family Centred Care faces is a lack of knowledge and understanding among family members on how to care for the sick. The end result is low medical care services. Another challenge comes with the assumption that parents and family members are willing to take care of their sick. This is not always the case; there are some instances that parents and family members don’t want to be associated with their sick.
This is a challenge to the operation of the system. To manage the program, the supporters and implementers need to have adequate sums of money to support the entire process; the requirement creates pressure in the medical care services. At the initial stages, the method is highly expensive where the responsible medical care facility has the mandate of ensuring the family getting the responsibility understand their duty and how to undertake it.
When parents and family assume the role of being medical care giver, their lack of understanding and knowledge in the practice may result in ignorance of some symptoms and signs that would otherwise be of great concern if the patient were in a medical care service centre. The ignorance might lead to patients deteriorating in health and lack of proper medication arises (Eisler, 2011).
References
Eisler, K. (2011). Patient and family centred care (PFCC). SRNA Newsbulletin, 13(3), 4.
Pollock-Robinson, C. (2009). Family-centred care, patient-centred care and culturally competent care: common themes and background meanings. Whitireia Nursing Journal, (16), 58.