Achieving True Partnership

Thanks, therefore, are due to the people who gave us the big picture on who is working on patient and family integration in Ontario, to others who organized meetings and interviews, and to the people who dug through their archives and their e-mails and even boxes under their desks to provide documents and other resources for review. [...] The longstanding family and youth advisory councils, made up of people with the language skills and time to attend monthly meetings at the hospital, didn’t reflect that mix and the voices of the younger chil- dren were scarcely heard. [...] The hospital based its renewal on the work of the Institute for Patient and Family Centered Care in Maryland, which included developing a change-management framework to create a common vision, ensuring goals and concepts were clearly communicated to everyone, and applied evenly across the institution. [...] It appointed the manager of patient experience (who oversaw the family and youth advisory councils) and the team leader for quality improvement (who was in charge of the hospital’s Lean project) as co-leads, and used a combination of Lean and co-design methods to build a clearly defined framework for engagement. [...] You need to teach them how to parent a preterm infant, and you need to teach them how important they are in the preterm infant’s life…but you also have to give them the skills to interact with the medical team in a way that’s good for them and good for the team.