Chiropractic + Naturopathic Doctor • February 2016 • From The Editor

Patient-centred care is currently dominating many discussions in the chiropractic community and promises to continue to be a hot topic of conversation among health professionals. It was certainly the theme for many health care conferences I’ve attended this past year.

This clinical method of putting patients at the centre of health care delivery is not new. In fact since the early 2000s, many health-related publications have covered this topic. In its 2001 publication titled, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century, the U.S. Institute of Medicine defined patient-centred care as, “providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs and values, and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions.”

Patient-centred care may not be a novel concept, but it surely has not been fully exploited after all these years. The increasing demand for a better, more efficient health-care system is pushing the envelope in patient care and, as a consequence, driving health-care professionals toward collaboration.

Adopting a patient-centred approach does not only require doctors to respect and respond to the patients’ “preferences, needs and values.” It should also compel practitioners to go beyond the four walls of the clinic – acknowledging their own abilities and limitations – and work with other health experts to deliver the best possible clinical care for the patient.

Patient-centred care and interprofessional collaboration – the latter is almost a necessary consequence of the former. A practice cannot claim to be patient-centred without genuine intent and willingness to work not just within the same profession but with other health professionals as well. I can’t imagine a practice being truly sustainable and successful if it fails to put patient’s interests first and foremost – and push egos to the back burner.

At the B.C. Chiropractic Convention last fall, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Kim Humphreys, a Canadian chiropractor who is the head of the Chiropractic Medicine programme under the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. When asked about his insight from years of working collaboratively with the Swiss medical community, he replied: “I think our profession would be a lot better off if we stop focusing on ourselves. We should be constantly talking about how we’re going to be better practitioners for our patients. How do we work in a team. It should be all about the patient.”