Dr Martha Gaines Discusses the Importance of the Patient Voice

When making changes in healthcare, the patient’s voice is rarely at the table, said Martha Gaines, MD, JD, LLM, founder and director of The Center for Patient Partnerships, clinical professor of law, University of Wisconsin Law School.

Transcript

What are the fundamentals of The Center for Patient Partnerships and how does this help produce patient-centered care?

The 4 pillars are education, advocacy, research, and system change. Education translates across or spreads across all 4, everything we do, basically. There are always students involved, graduate students and now some undergraduate students. So, education is about saying, “What should the system be like, how could healthcare be better, and how can we help make it that way?” but from the angle of engaging, including, and incorporating the patient’s voice or patients’ voices in healthcare at every level at every change.

Today, in the United States, we make a lot of changes in healthcare, but we rarely have patients’ voices at the table when we’re making them, and it’s very important to have everybody who’s going to experience the change around the table so that we don’t make change after change after change that turns out to backfire on us because it doesn’t take care of the user.