Judith Park, Deputy Chief Executive reflects on our recent implementing outcome measures into clinical practice conference held at Clifford House.
“We were delighted to work in partnership with Hospice UK and our sponsor Eduserv, a not-for-profit provider of technology advice, engineering and support (https://www.eduserv.org.uk/), to host a one day conference focusing on implementing outcome measures into clinical practice.” said Judith.
“The conference drew together healthcare professionals and service improvement leads from hospices across the county, all at varying stages in their journey of incorporating patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) into practice.
The day was a tremendous success and featured a variety of interesting and though-provoking presentations around the importance of using PROMs in palliative care and the evidence supporting their use. We also shared our knowledge and top tips to support other hospices with incorporating them effectively into their own areas.
Evidence is growing around the impact PROMs can have in palliative care settings on processes and outcomes of care, as well as improving communication and congruence between patients and healthcare professionals. There was a lot of lively discussion around the difference PROMs can make with measuring and demonstrating the benefits of services not only to individual patients but also at service, sector and national levels. They can help us to establish an evidence base to drive service improvements, to ensure the delivery of high quality care and facilitating a benchmarking system to compare hospices nationally.
It was however identified that integrating PROMs into clinical practice is not always easy and to do so it requires considerable cultural and organisational changes, as well as engagement of teams at all levels. Strong leadership and ownership over the process are key to drive changes forward, as well as adopting a transparent and consistent approach with an effective feedback mechanism to keep teams engaged. Investment in IT resources and staff is also essential to have systems in place to collate, store and analyses the data collected.
The utilisation of PROMs in palliative care is gathering momentum year and year, and together through sharing our knowledge and experiences we can achieve great things.”
Click here to download the videos and presentations from the conference.