Powered By Patients
Planetree is very proud of its legacy of amplifying the voices of patients as among the powerful levers for improving our healthcare delivery system. Including patients and family members among the keynote speakers, attendees and session presenters at our annual International Conference on Patient-Centered Care, now in its 23nd year, is just one way we achieve this aim.
We’ve been inviting patients to participate in the Planetree Conference long before there was a campaign encouraging conference planners to do so simply because we knew that to have a conference on patient-centered care without including patients would be a hollow effort that would only perpetuate business as usual. That’s not the business Planetree is in. Working in partnership with healthcare organizations, patient advocacy groups, policymakers and researchers, Planetree aims to transform how care is delivered by truly putting patients first —in all that we do.
At the 2015 Planetree International Conference on Patient-Centered Care, being held in Boston,Massachusetts on October 11-14th, patients and family members will take center stage. Keynote speaker Sarah E. Kucharski, patient advocate, CEO/Chairman and Founder of FMD Chat will speak from the patient perspective about how genuine partnerships with professional caregivers can transform the patient experience. Alan Manning will share his and his wife’s personal journey as caregivers to their first born daughter, Katie, who died from a congenital heart defect, and dancer, Adrianne Haslet-Davis, will talk about how she survived the unimaginable bombings at the 2013 Boston Marathon where she lost her left leg below the knee.
The Patient-Preferred Practices Track at the conference will examine the mechanics of hallmark patient-centered care practices identified by patients themselves as how they want their care delivered —among them, the shared medical record, patient-directed visiting, bedside shift report and care partners. Members of Planetree’s International Patient and Family Partnership Council, a group convened to harness the insights of patients and family members to guide Planetee’s program development, will be on hand to lend their unique perspectives on how these practices can be re-engineered to better meet the needs of patients.
The conference’s poster session will feature the theme of partnership in action, with volunteer patient, family and resident advisors asked to join forces with healthcare professionals to depict how they are working together to take their patient-centered care initiatives to higher ground.
