EDUCATING THE HEALTH-CARE TEAM

How can health professional teams provide patient-centred care in the treatment of chronic disease? What education and training is needed to achieve this? Patient-centred care means helping people living with a condition make informed choices to maximise their quality of life. The health professional's role is to facilitate: to ensure patients and those around them take effective and appropriate self-management of the condition. To achieve this, high quality team working is needed amongst people who do not interact in the course of their day-to-day work. Education for this should begin with students, expand when staff are newly qualified, become a feature of specialist training, and extend through continuing professional development. A unified philosophy and strategy then is needed for life-long professional education and training. Generalised principles are proposed for what should happen and who can best provide it, and these can be widely applied in many fields of health professional education.