Page 135 - Shared Guideline Development Experiences in Fertility Care

(Guideline-based) indicators for patient-centredness
Discussion
is study shows that the quality indicator development process regarding patient- centredness is a ected by patient involvement. Only ve indicators were included in both the patients’ and professionals’ nal sets of indicators. Although both patients and professionals valued information and communication in fertility care most prominently, patients also emphasized the importance of access to care, whereas professionals emphasized the importance of coordination and integration of fertility care.
So far, within fertility care this is the rst study that focuses on the development
of guideline-based quality indicators for measuring and monitoring patient- centredness. Moreover, this is the rst study on separately developing indicators
among patients as well as a multidisciplinary professional panel. Generic and
speci c guideline-based quality indicators for fertility care have been developed
previously [14-16]. However, as these studies mainly focused on the medical-
technical quality of fertility care, indicators for patient-centredness were scant. Remarkably, since only gynaecologists were involved in the development
process, instead of patients or other fertility care professionals, the selected
indicators regarding patient-centredness of care mainly focused on information
and communication. is is in line with the high percentage of indicators in the professionals’ set (33%) on information and communication in our study. Although
indicators for patient-centredness have previously been developed in the eld of
cancer care, they were not exclusively guideline-based and patients played a minor
role in the development panel [19, 20]. ese studies resulted in largely merged 6 indicators that also mainly focused on information and communication regarding
generic patient-centred cancer care. In one of these studies, patients actually got the opportunity to contribute in a face-to-face consensus round, without being snowed under by professionals in the development panel. Remarkably, they then selected additional indicators regarding access to care and information as well as communication, which is in line with our study results [20]. e latter might not only suggest uniformity in importance on dimensions of patient-centredness according to patients, but also underlines the need to involve patients in such a way that they are actually able to contribute to the entire development process. Within the eld of fertility care, other studies also aimed at measuring the level of patient-centredness through patients’ experience surveys [4-6, 9, 27]. ese studies evaluated patient-centredness in fertility care, but were not supported by
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