MCG’s family-centered care featured on PBS
by Danielle Wong Moores
What will the hospital of the future be like? Thanks partly to MCG Health System, it will be a place where care is better because the expertise of patients and families is built into the care delivery system.
That future of care is featured in the PBS documentary “Remaking American Medicine™…Health Care for the 21st Century,” a four-part series highlighting how hospitals across the country are working to improve care. MCG Health System’s patient- and family-centered care philosophy will be profiled Sunday night in the final hour-long program of the series, “Hand in Hand.”
Over the course of a year, crews captured the everyday stories of patients, families, staff, physicians and administrators at MCG Health System. Together the stories reinforce the concept that involving patients and families in their own health care makes care safer, helps shorten hospital stays and improves the quality of care given at home after discharge. In addition, crews chronicled how patients and families are involved in teaching this concept to the next generation of health care providers at MCG.
“To put it simply, patient- and family-centered care is what most of us would want and expect to receive when we are in the hospital — care that welcomes our opinions and respects our voices as patients,” said Pat Sodomka, senior vice president for patient- and family-centered care at MCG Health, Inc. and director of the center for patient- and family-centered care at MCG. “Until a few years ago, this was not the case in most institutions across the country. Now our organization is working with these same institutions to show them the changes our organization has been able to achieve in the clinical care setting through partnerships with patients and families.”
To impact future health care providers, an interdisciplinary committee at MCG is working to incorporate patient- and family-centered care into the curriculum of all academic programs.
“It’s really a culture change,” said Dr. Roman Cibirka, vice president for instruction and associate provost at MCG. “Our goal is to develop a belief system in our students from their first experiences on campus all the way to graduation and beyond. We want them to embrace the patient- and family-centered care concept during their successes here, but also carry those concepts to their career pathways for the advancement of patient safety and patient-centered care in society.”
Locally, the program featuring MCG Health System and MCG airs on GPB Sunday, Oct. 29, from 6-7 p.m. SCETV’s analog subscribers will also see the program at that date and time, while SCETV’s digital subscribers will have an early viewing tonight, Oct. 26 from 10-11 p.m.