Effective personalised care must focus on individual strengths, daily activities and social connections, new report finds.
A new report from the Royal College of Occupational Therapists, (RCOT), has identified three key factors to enable personalised care:
- Focusing on a person’s strengths and balancing choice and risk
- Enabling people to take part in daily activities that are important to them
- Ensuring people stay connected to family, friends and communities
1 – The current approach to health and social care focuses on what people can’t or shouldn’t do – often for fear of aggravating or exacerbating existing conditions and placing further burden on services for treatment. Effective personalised care embraces risk taking so people focus on what they need and would like to be doing.
2 – A ‘can do’ ‘culture enables people with health conditions to feel productive and valuable both to themselves and the community.
3 – When people can’t or shouldn’t do things, they end up isolated, lonely and disconnected from family, friends and the community. Social connections are vital for a person’s wellbeing and enabling participation in the daily activities that are important to them often facilitates social connections. With around 50% of disabled people and 1.2 million people reporting being ‘chronically lonely’, there is a vast need to support wellbeing through social connections.
Julia Scott, Chief Executive of RCOT says; “Personalised care is about placing what matters to the individual at the heart of their health and social care. For occupational therapists, personalised care is about focusing on people’s strengths and enabling individuals to carry out the activities they need and want to do in their lives. It is intrinsic to our profession and always has been. We would urge health and social care leaders, commissioners and managers to look to their occupational therapy workforce to enable personalised care across their services.”
Source: Effective personalised care must focus on ‘Can, not can’t’ | Care Industry News