Overview

Too often health systems are centred around the disease rather than the patient. This policy brief identifies the key elements and potential benefits of patient-centred care for people with multimorbidity and flags up the strategies, which can help to strengthen patient-centred care. This policy brief by the European Observatory shows that making care focus on patients is a way of overcoming the fragmentation that results from the “disease orientation” of Europe’s health systems, which still tend to organize around single medical specialties.

Patient-centredness can help increases patient satisfaction and counters the problems associated with fragmented care, such as contradictory medical advice, over prescribing, over hospitalization and unresponsiveness. It also suggests that patient-centredness requires a coordinated approach to the organization and delivery of care (and works well with integrated care initiatives).