Are You As Patient Centred As You Think You Are?

Are you really as patient centered as you think you are? And the reason I ask this is because recently I was at the BCA's winter conference. The BCA, the British Chiropractic association, they have recently rebranded themselves as the Home for Patient Centered Chiropractors. So, as you'd imagine at this conference, there was a lot of talk about being patient centered. But the whole time I was listening to these different speakers on stage, these panel discussions and things like this, there was something nagging at me. And I couldn't quite put my finger on it until about halfway through the day. And I realized that although people were using this phrase, they didn't really seem to understand what it meant. A lot of the times, in fact, when most of even the speakers on stage were talking about patient centered care, what they actually meant was individualized care or personalized care. They were talking about the importance of tailoring your care to the patient in front of you. Now obviously that is important and I'm not knocking that at all. And it is, it's one of the necessary prerequisites if you want to be patient centered. But the thing is, personalizing care is something that you do. Being patient centered is something that you are. It's. You know the words of Carl Rogers. He wrote a book titled A Way of Being. That is what Being patient Centered. It's a philosophy, it's a why, not a what or a how. And I think this is getting missed a lot because I didn't really hear about any talk of this during the conference itself. So to help do this, what I'm going to do over the next couple of weeks is I'm going to take a deeper dive into the origins of patient centered theory. So you can really see where it came from. And to do that, we're going to go back to the founding father of person centered theory. Person centered theory was the. Was where patient centered care comes from. Basically, it was created in the 60s by a chap called Carl Rogers. Carl Rogers was a psychotherapist. He was a student of Carl Jung, a contemporary of Freud's, one of the most famous psychotherapists ever. And Carl Rogers developed person centered theory is a strand of the third strand actually of psychotherapy called the humanistic view. So you have psychodynamics, which is all to do with looking at your past, past patterns like Freud, Jung, people like that. Then you have the cognitive approaches, like cognitive behavioral therapy being the most famous. Then you have the humanistic ones. And a lot of the humanistic was based on Carl Rogers approach to person centered theory. His approach was revolutionary. He didn't approach the patient with a theory. He didn't approach his client with an idea or a mechanism. All he did was listen as well as he could to show the patient how well he understood them, to really connect with them at a deeper level. And what he found was he got results on par of other people using these complex theories, even though he wasn't actually offering any advice or spotting anything for them. And to do that, he developed what he called the three core conditions. And these to me are three core conditions you have to embody. If you're going to be a patient centered practitioner, there's no way around them. We need to do this. So those three core conditions I'm going to talk about over the next couple of weeks, what they are is empathy, which you think is pretty obvious congruence, which the vitalists have got a hijack, but we're going to talk about a bit more and then unconditional positive regard. So if you can demonstrate empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard, that is going to actually allow you to be more patient centered than you think. Because in my experience, most of us are patient centered. Light. What that means is that we think we're being patient centered, we're being nice, we're personalizing our care, but we're not actually embodying this deeper approach, this approach that's really about strengthening and cementing the therapeutic relationship. The bond you have between your patients. If you don't have that right, you can personalize care without caring about the patient. You can certainly personalize care without being empathic, you can personalize care without being congruent, and you can personalize it with very, very conditional positive regard. I'll explain what those are in later videos there. And as well as that setting goals, we talk about finding out what matters to the patient. Again, very, very key. That's going to really help us with the empathy side. But it's not enough on its own. So if you're sat there thinking that patient centered care is something you do, if you think it's about, you know, personalizing your care, if you think, well, I ask my patients goals and I find out what matters to them, I'm being patient centered. This next couple of weeks, I'm going to challenge you a little bit because I think you're going to see that there's actually a lot more to it. And the vast majority of practitioners out there are completely missing this. The great news is that when you get this. You will stand head and shoulders above any other practitioner that your patients either have seen or could see. It's so, so rare to see these skills embodied outside of the counseling the psychotherapist space, but I would argue that they should be fundamental skills for every single healthcare practitioner. It doesn't matter what your discipline is, so keep an eye on that. I'll be sharing more over the next couple of weeks. We'll talk first about empathy and why it's probably not what you think it is. We'll talk about congruence. I want to take that word back from the vitalist a little bit because it doesn't mean what they mean it to mean. And then we'll talk about unconditional positive regard, which is pretty much a superpower if you can get that right. Patients will trust and respect you and really connect with you like never before. So keep an eye out for that. I'll be sharing that in the next couple of weeks. I look forward to seeing you there.