What is person-centred care?
Lisa Booth, Everyturn Mental Health Regional Lead for the North, explains what person-centred care means to her.
At Everyturn Mental Health, we provide a wide range of therapies to support patients’ mental health and wellbeing. In our service here in Bassetlaw, we offer one-to-one support, as well as webinars, to reach and support as many people as possible.
We use a ‘step care’ model of therapy, which means that our patients can be offered different treatments by our service, depending on their individual needs. This means we can support each patient to move towards recovery and make positive changes in their life.
For instance, a patient may refer into our service needing support for depression, but also mentions that their depression has an impact on their relationship with their partner. This means we can offer the patient one-to-one therapy, or couples therapy for their depression.
Sometimes, patients come to us when they are unemployed and struggling with their mental health. We would of course support them with their mental health, but if they also told us that they felt ready to go back to work, we can signpost or refer them to community employment services. These services help patients with volunteering opportunities or taking the next steps towards getting into employment.
In this case, our links to community support groups are really important. It’s not just what we do – it’s how we reach out to community services and work together.
In order to take a well-rounded, person-centred approach to care, we have to work out what support is needed, and, if a patient has needs that we can’t meet, we direct them to the best service to provide that support.
This all means that it’s crucial that our colleagues have a great knowledge of the kinds of community support networks and specialist services available. We make sure that all information is included in our induction process, shared with the team, and kept updated.
To build our links with wider support in the community, we dedicate a lot of time to building strong working relationships and networks that work towards the same goal: getting the best outcome for all patients. We make sure that new services in our community are invited to our team meetings, so we can begin to build our relationship and share information about how to make referrals.
We build strong relationships with external services and commissioners because the only way to meet the needs of everyone is if we work together.
How do we provide person-centred care in our services?
Giving people a choice
Our talking therapies also put the person at the centre. We offer a range of therapies and work alongside the people we support to decide on a treatment path that is right for them.
By empowering the people with a voice and listening to their needs, we can offer people the support they both need and want.
