In this, the twelfth and final installment of our Empowering the Citizen Patient series, Dr. Mindy Smith, retired family physician and member of the Patient Advisory Committee in the Kootenay Boundary, highlights the crucial role patients play in shaping our healthcare system.

This article explores how sharing your insights and experiences can improve care, and provides practical ways to get involved in initiatives that make a difference for everyone in our community.

Your Experience Matters

Patient viewpoints are critical to improving our healthcare system. When dealing with chronic illnesses, surgical care, chronic pain, or caregiving, as patients we gain valuable insights into what works—and what doesn’t—with the care we receive.

Our experiences with health care are also shaped by many factors like age, income, culture, access to care, and interactions with primary healthcare teams in rural and remote BC. Healthcare providers are not always trained to support team-based care including considerations of race, gender, and sexual orientation. These factors significantly influence our interactions within our complex healthcare systems.

By sharing what we know and experience as patients and caregivers, we can help shape a healthcare system that works better for everyone. The good news? There are many ways in which we can share our experiences with healthcare providers. This article is focused on giving you the information and hopefully inspiration you need to get involved!

Many Ways to Get Involved and Share Your Experiences

As highlighted in the first article of this series, our healthcare system is evolving to meet the needs of a growing, aging population with increasingly complex healthcare needs. Many groups are assisting with this transition and are actively seeking patient partners to help improve quality of care. These groups include those overseeing healthcare delivery, such as the Divisions of Family Practice, Collaborative Services Committee (CSC), and Primary Care Network (PCN) Steering Committee. Others like the Interior Health’s BC SUPPORT Unit include patients in research initiatives to find better treatments for specific health concerns.

One great way to get involved is by joining the Patient Voices Network (PVN) administered by Health Quality BC. Launched by the BC Ministry of Health, the PVN connects healthcare teams with patients, family members, and caregivers to ensure the patient’s voice is heard and that they are active participants in initiatives to improve our healthcare system.

PVN also offers support and resources to healthcare professionals to ensure their improvement work reflects the needs and experiences of the people it impacts. Together, patients and providers have worked on projects ranging from improving emergency psychiatric care to enhancing access to medical imaging. You can explore these success stories and find out how to get involved through their website.

What Matters to You!

Other great work is happening at BC Cancer and Health Quality BC. BC Cancer integrates patient perspectives into cancer care and offers training for healthcare providers who want to involve patients in their work. Health Quality BC focuses on collaborative projects such as improving care for patients with diabetes. They host an annual conference, the Quality Forum, that brings together BC’s healthcare community and patients to share and discuss how to improve quality across the continuum of care.​​ Health Quality BC leads the country in the internationally-recognized “What Matters to You!” campaign that supports care providers in providing culturally safe care, free of prejudice and discrimination. Learn more about this campaign and share your story.

The Kootenay Boundary Patient Advisory Committee and Community (KBPACC) has been active since 2018 to provide patient input to local healthcare organizations and practitioners to improve our local, rural healthcare system. We’ve advised on initiatives such as the rollout of the KB Primary Care Network (PCN), the Lower Columbia Community Health Centre, and PRIMA Health to improve access to care. This past year, we’ve focused on creating educational articles for patients (you’re reading one of them now!) The Empowering the Citizen patient articles cover topics from caregiving to supports for patients without a primary care provider. In the coming year, we’ll be developing navigation maps to help people prepare for surgery. Those interested in learning more should visit our website at kbpacc.ca.

We sincerely thank the Nelson Star and other Black Press Media outlets for their invaluable support in sharing and promoting each article. We’d also like to acknowledge The Citizen Patient: Reforming Health Care for the Sake of the Patient, Not the System by Dr. Nortin Hadler, which inspired this campaign and encourages patients to take a more active role in shaping the healthcare system.

Finally, we’d like to thank all of the expert article reviewers, including: Dr. David Merry, Suzanne Lee, Christy Anderson, Dr. Selena Davis PhD, Dr. Richard Slavik, Dr. Shelina Musaji, NP James Kitch, Nikko Snyder, Mona Mattei, Sarah McLeod, Dr. Erin Charman,  Dr. Janet Fisher, Charmaine Niebergall and many more – if we missed you, please let us know!

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