Hello, I’m Kelly Holehouse and I am the Programme Manager for Personalised Care in East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust.
While this is a brand new role for our Trust (and indeed our region), I am far from new to ELHT having worked as a Musculoskeletal (MSK) Physiotherapist with our IMPReS service for over 15 years. I developed a strong passion for tackling health inequalities and population health which aligns perfectly with this new role and as colleagues will confirm I do not need asking twice to talk about these issues, so I was delighted to be given the opportunity to guest blog this week.
My aim is to introduce the concept of personalised care to those who may not be familiar with it already. Personalised care aims to support an individualised approach to healthcare and although it isn’t an entirely new concept, thanks to the NHS Long Term plan there is a renewed drive to transform our ways of working to ensure we work in partnership with patients to give them choice about how, where and when their care happens.
Supporting control and choice through shared decision making ensures patients are able to live the lives they want.
The first step to embedding personalised care is to simply ask patients ‘what matters to you?’ The minute we ask this instead of ‘what’s the matter with you?’ we enable patients to play a more active role in their care. It also helps us as healthcare professionals understand why some patients might struggle to engage with the current support offer and enables us to identify ways to support patients more effectively in a way that is equitable for all and that better meets their individual health and social needs.
Embedding this way of working has well documented benefits in terms of increasing patients’ outcomes and experiences and has been proven to reduce unnecessary hospital appointments and emergency admissions, which in turn frees up clinicians to spend with those who need our help most.
My mission is to support ELHT to be a leading example of embedding universal and equitable personalised care into everyday practice and I am incredibly excited to be able to support colleagues to work alongside patients and communities in a way that truly places the patient at the centre of their health and wellbeing choices. This ‘journey’ has already started in our MSK Physiotherapy teams who attended a workshop recently to start considering the opportunities to do this. I feel very passionate that personalised care can help us to continue to deliver safe, personal and effective care but in a different way that will benefits patients even more and I look forward to sharing their successes with you all in the near future.
I really hope this blog will have whetted your appetite to know more about personalised care and the benefits it can offer your services and patients and would welcome and encourage you to get in touch if you would like to discuss this further.
In the meantime, I would encourage everyone reading this to ask your patients (and themselves) one simple question: “what matters to you?”
What matters to me is being able to make a difference to the people of East Lancashire and I have no doubt that through embedding and strengthening our personalised care offer into all our services, we can achieve this together! It would be fantastic to connect with any other teams who might want to explore personalised care further as we work towards spreading this work wider.
Thank you for reading and please do get in touch - I am here to help!
Best wishes,
Kelly