Symposium on Patient Engagement

The Nursing Alliance for Quality Care (NAQC) is a national group of nursing organizations that, along with patient care advocacy organizations, are committed to advancing the highest quality, safety, and value of consumer-centered health care. NAQC identified the need to study nurses’ roles and skills that foster patient engagement and the need for a strategic plan to enhance nurses’ abilities to engage and support patients in advancing their own values and preferences as they make decisions about health and health care. This project held a consensus conference in November 2012 to discuss nurse’s roles and to develop such a strategic plan. After the symposium, a white paper summarizing the themes of the conference and the plan was written.

The specific aims of this project were to:

• Develop a national consensus-based white paper that will define the role of nurses in fostering consumer/patient and family engagement in every aspect of health care including decisionmaking, care coordination, and self-care management. 
• Involve a diverse, interdisciplinary group of health professionals in a symposium and follow-on activities that will promote significant patient engagement policy research and strategy setting that will ultimately improve the patient/consumer health care experience. 
• Use the symposium activities and a white paper to establish a set of consensus-based recommendations and action steps that nurses can use to facilitate patient engagement. 

The patient engagement symposium was attended by 119 individuals and received high praise by attendees. Eighteen educational sessions and several poster presentations were provided. Materials from the symposium were made available on the NAQC Web site. The white paper, available at http://www.naqc.org/WhitePaper-PatientEngagement, is titled Fostering Successful Patient and Family Engagement: Nursing’s Critical Role. This white paper was distributed to all NAQC organizational members, symposium speakers, and participants; posted on the Web site; and widely disseminated by the NAQC member organizations to their constituents.

The paper contains a new definition of patient engagement, as follows:

“patient engagement is the involvement in their own care by individuals (and others they designate to engage on their behalf), with the goal that they make competent, well-informed decisions about their health and health care and take action to support those decisions.”

In addition, the paper outlines a national strategic plan with action steps for the profession to address in order to enhance the skills and behaviors of nurses working with patients and families, and to support nurses in advocating for patients in the health care systems in which engagement occurs.

The project team noted remaining challenges, including a need for regular and in-depth communication within the community and the need for key shared messages. NAQC and others have committed to track progress within and across individual strategic areas. NAQC member organizations are beginning to identify and address areas of the strategic plan best suited to their particular strengths to carry this work forward.