The Institute provides national leadership in patient- and family-centered care and serves as a resource for policy makers, administrators, program planners, direct service providers, educators, design professionals, patients, and family members.
The Institute serves as a consultant to the NIC/Q 2009 Quality Improvement Collaborative of the Vermont Oxford Network (VON). VON is an international organization committed to improving quality and safety in medical care for newborn infants and their families through education, research, and quality improvement. There are teams from 53 hospitals and several state-wide organizations participating in this collaborative.
The Collaborative's vision is: "To be an inclusive Community of Practice that supports the pursuit of shared goals for improvement and the provision of exemplary care for all newborn infants and their families."
Based on the work in previous VON collaboratives, family involvement in quality improvement has systematically become an integral part of VON initiatives. VON has a family member on its Advisory Board. A family member serves on the core faculty team. Families are active participants on the majority of improvement teams.
The New Health Partnerships on-line community is a project built and supported by individuals and organizations that believe that patients and families, in partnership with health care providers, can transform care for long-term conditions. This website was made possible through a generous contribution from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It was created by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in partnership with:
- The Institute for Family-Centered Care
- The Institute for Healthcare Communication
- The MacColl Institute for Healthcare Innovation
The goals of New Health Partnerships are to:
- Support a patient- and family-centered approach to health care in which patients with chronic conditions, families, and providers work together;
- Offer resources and tools to clinicians, patients, family members, and communities so that they can effectively collaborate in self-management support;
- Build community-wide support for collaborative self-management;
- Use up-to-date technologies to assist providers, patients, family members, and communities in improving chronic care;
- Provide clinicians and administrative leaders with tools and examples to evaluate the business case for collaborative self-management support; and
- Encourage the active participation of all in New Health Partnerships.
Please visit www.newhealthpartnerships.org to learn how patients, family members, and health care providers can work together as partners to improve chronic illness care.
Quality Allies: Improving Care by Engaging Patients
In March 2005, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) was awarded a three-year grant by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to advance the understanding and practice of collaborative self-management support for patients with chronic illness. The Institute for Family-Centered Care was invited to participate on the leadership team for this important endeavor, joining IHI, Rush Medical College and John H. Stroger Hospital of Cook County, White Mountain Research Associates, and the MacColl Institute.
The purpose of the Quality Allies project is to create a Collaborative Self-Management Support Learning Network that will be implemented in over 20 health care organizations. On-line communities are being developed to increase collaborative learning among patients, families, providers, and community agencies.
United States Armed Services
The Surgeon General of the Navy declared family-centered care a strategic priority for Navy Medicine in 2001. Family-centered care is now a priority for all of the armed forces—the Army, Air Force, and Navy. The work has focused initially in maternity care, newborn intensive care, and pediatrics, but it is intended to become the standard of care for all of military medicine across the lifespan. The Institute is providing training and technical assistance for this effort. The American Institutes for Research has asked the Institute to serve on the research team to develop tools to measure the extent to which patient- and family-centered care has been implemented in Military Medicine. Through the TRICARE system, the Institute for Family-Centered Care is currently working with military treatment facilities to further their collaboration with patients and their families.