Patient and family advisory councils (PFAC) feedback as the voice of health care consumers

Abstract

Background: Throughout the U.S., healthcare organizations continuously find ways to incorporate patient feedback with efforts to advance the delivery of patient-centered care. Patient and family advisory councils (PFACs) can be used as a strategy to better understand and honor the patient experience and improve care delivery thanks to patient input to obtain patient perspectives. The importance of formal efforts to incorporate the patient perspective is highlighted by the Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+) program implemented by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services which requires organizations to establish PFACs to receive funding. Site support for PFACs included a patient experience manager who oversaw recruitment and facilitated each clinic’s council meetings. Other support personnel consisted of the practice manager, physicians, care coordinators, and advanced practice providers. This study employed a leadership framework to better understand how health care organizations use PFACs to discover and define patient/family advisors perspectives and how they can be related to different styles of leadership used within healthcare settings. Using contemporary leadership styles such as servant leadership, transactional leadership, transformational leadership, and leader-member exchange (LMX) theory, we examined perspectives of PFAC member’s associated with leadership and its effect on their experience as a patient/family advisor. This study aimed to understand the patient/family advisor perceptions associated with the impact of PFACs and the decisions surrounding the academic medical center and how health care leaders can support these perceptions with the leadership styles outlined above.