Alternate Level of Care: Using the Patient and Caregiver Experience to Guide Health System Performance Measurement

Health care systems around the world are striving to improve the quality of care that patients and caregivers experience. In order to improve personal care experience we need to ask the right questions, and use this information to inform what we can do better. The goal of our research is to host a small conference for policy planners, data developers, administrators, clinicians and front line care providers with the following specific objectives: 1) Share research findings on the experience of patients and caregivers who have experienced a breakdown in health care quality (specifically, a delayed hospital discharge). 2) Share information on the measures and tools that are currently used to capture the experience of patients and caregivers in the healthcare system (including gaps and limitations). 3) Have a focused discussion with participants on ways to best capture patient and caregiver experience going forward. 4) Following the conference, share our findings on how best to collect information on personal care experience across Canada in a series of papers from the perspectives of researchers, policy planners, hospital discharge planners, caregivers and others. 5) Create a community of practice (comprised of researchers, decision makers, clinicians, etc.) to support ongoing communication and knowledge sharing on the use and development of indicators that best capture patient and caregiver experience.