Engaging patients to improve quality of care: a systematic review

Abstract

Training also offered the benefit of building positive relationships between users, facilitators, and staff [43, 45, 49, 53, 54], which also served to mediate a key barrier identified: providers’ skepticism towards engaging patients and devolving power to them [42, 55]. [...]these techniques helped to create a level playing field and support staff in their efforts to be partners. [...]attention was also paid to the physical environment (e.g., cleanliness, chair arrangement [53]) and use of physical props, and visual mapping, which supported participants’ discussion and interactions as well as demonstrated to service users the importance of their contribution [68]. Despite the large number of initial search results, there was only a small number of studies focused on involving patients in co-designing health service improvement. [...]despite our best attempts, the specificity of our search criteria was modest, a problem familiar to systematic reviews in health services research, which typically crosses many disciplinary boundaries [38]. [...]since it is difficult to draw causal relationships between patient engagement and health outcomes, future research should incorporate longitudinal measures and approaches to explore the impact of patient co-design on quality of care.