Planetree Person-Centered Care Services

Planetree offers a full spectrum of consulting services to support you and your organization at any stage of the Person-Centered Care Certification journey. Whether you’re just beginning the transition to person-centered care or looking to evaluate, optimize, and sustain an existing effort, we offer training and support that keeps patients, their families, and the community at the heart of your processes.

Healthcare facilities who earn Planetree Certification for Excellence in Person-Centered Care show an improvement in patient outcomes, staff satisfaction and retention, and patient experience scores. Visit certification.planetree.org to learn more about our Certification Criteria and the benefits of certification.

Person-Centered Care Assessments

Organizational Assessment

Informed by a combination of focus groups, structured observation, interviews, tours, and historical data, this comprehensive culture audit highlights organizational successes and opportunities. This effort sets the pace and direction for goal setting and implementation planning to advance person-centered priorities within the organization. With an understanding of your organization’s current state, Planetree coaches will provide targeted recommendations for establishing (or strengthening) structures, processes, practices, and cultural underpinnings to ensure any person-centered improvement efforts are effective and sustainable.

Certification Assessment

This is a required on-site assessment for any organization seeking formal recognition for person-centered excellence through the Planetree Certification Program. Conducted after submission of the Certification Self-Assessment, this assessment validates effective fulfillment of each of the 26 certification criteria.

Health Literacy Assessment

Evidence demonstrates that poor health literacy is a stronger predictor of a person’s health than age, income, employment status, education level, and race. What’s more, low health literacy is linked to higher risk of death and more emergency room visits and hospitalizations. This assessment gauges your organization’s capacity to care for individuals across a range of health literacy levels. The process will uncover barriers, emphasize and leverage patient education strengths, and provide an action plan to understand and meet the educational needs of those you serve.

Practice Audit

This on-site appraisal of specific person-centered initiatives is designed to guide organizations in quality checking these strategies. A Planetree coach observes the practice in action, and provides at-the-elbow coaching for improvement. The audits conclude with specific feedback and recommendations for fine-tuning practice delivery to achieve organizational goals. Examples of practices Planetree audits include experiential staff education sessions, bedside shift reports, patient and family partnership councils, and more.

Person-Centered Infrastructure Development

Leadership Goal Development and Strategic Planning

Planetree will assist your senior executives in identifying and developing the common goals, expectations, and practices needed to align person-centered care implementation efforts with strategic priorities. Through open dialogue, this program drives dedication and direction, building the foundation of leadership commitment that has been identified as a key driver for success in transformational culture change.

Patient and Family Partnership Council Development

Whether your organization is embarking on the creation of a Patient and Family Partnership Council or looking to maximize the impact of an existing one, Planetree will coach you through mapping the right path for doing so. We’ll share details on the essential elements of an effective council, strategies to gain and sustain momentum, and practical tools to get you started.

Human Resources System Development

A targeted audit of existing HR systems, tools, and employee experience data forms the basis for understanding your organization’s current activities related to workforce development. A Planetree coach will then examine specific opportunities to align employee recruitment, onboarding, training, retreats, and succession planning efforts with your organization’s person-centered culture.

Person-Centered Committee Development

Appropriate for newly forming committees or committees that need to re-energize their processes, this workshop equips your team with the knowledge necessary to guide the organization’s person-centered care journey — from membership recruitment to committee charter development and using data to drive change.

Team Development Coaching

This immersion program provides teams (for instance, departments, units, and practice teams) with real-time guidance on a current system or process of their choosing. Not only will the team solve their problem, but they will develop new skills and understand how to interact and connect more effectively with colleagues. The team will also gain the knowledge to implement a model of inclusive decision making.

Shared Governance Development

To create transparency and inclusion in an organization, you need a process for hearing each voice, including the patient. This service provides organizations with practical guidance for shifting toward a shared governance approach. Activities include focus groups, assistance in creating the design and function of the shared governance council structure, and coaching to provide key stakeholders with the skills necessary to sustain the governance approach and improve transparency, communication, and inclusive decision making within the organization, unit, or practice.

Board of Directors Programming

Educate and engage board members in the person-centered care implementation effort. Planetree will work within your organization’s culture and needs to develop a customized approach for personally connecting board members to the change vision.

Person-Centered Transitions of Care Programming

This workshop brings together representatives across your local care continuum to build relationships, identify gaps that undermine smooth transitions of care, and develop solutions for eliminating those gaps and improving care coordination.

Person-Centered Skill Building

Compassionate Interactions Coaching/Empathy Training

Trusting, empathic relationships between healthcare professionals and the patients and families they care for increase patient engagement and improve health outcomes. The majority of people who work in healthcare do so largely because they feel a calling to help others, with compassion at the heart of what they do. However, most have never had specific training in the behaviors and language cues that patients and coworkers interpret as caring and compassionate.

This training takes participants through a stepwise process of learning, roleplay, feedback, and mastery that will have immediate effects on their ability to communicate effectively, authentically, and compassionately with patients, family members, and each other.

Care Partner Program Coaching

Research shows that actively involving family caregivers in discharge planning efforts reduces significantly hospital readmissions. But what does it mean to “actively involve” family caregivers? What does it look like in practice? And how do you make it happen? A Care Partner Program is a structured way to help family members develop the confidence and competence to be effective partners in care for their loved ones throughout their healthcare experience.

This coaching offering provides practical guidance for implementing a Care Partner Program. It includes an assessment of existing strategies for family involvement, identification of barriers and facilitators for success, development of an action plan for moving from a pilot to full-scale implementation, and identification of metrics to track sustainability.

Customer Service Training

Patient loyalty and increased engagement come from providing a positive experience. This experience encompasses all interactions with patients and family caregivers — from making appointments to checking in, receiving treatment, navigating the building, receiving meals, picking up prescriptions, and more. This training equips participants with the specific behaviors and strategies all staff can adopt to make patients and families consistently feel welcomed and expected — not only cared for, but cared about.

Experiential Staff Education

Lectures and PowerPoint slides about person-centered care are not enough to truly engage the hearts and minds of staff. Experiential education offered on an ongoing basis will keep all staff sensitized to the experiences of patients and families (as well as their colleagues). Planetree will partner with your organization to develop and deliver experiential staff education sessions designed to rally your team around a collective purpose and help each individual better understand their role in bringing person-centered care to life each day.

Bedside Shift Report Coaching

Bedside shift reports entail more than re-locating where change of shift reports occur. Bedside staff must be coached to effectively leverage the change of location into an opportunity to engage patients (and family members) in a way that drives quality and improves outcomes, without being time-consuming.

This coaching offering — suitable both for organizations transitioning to bedside shift reports and those seeking to advance an existing effort — includes observation of current shift report practices, identification of barriers and facilitators for effective transition, development of a customized implementation action plan, and identification of metrics to track sustainability.

Care for the Caregiver Program Development

Instituting measures to support caregivers in maintaining their physical emotional well-being is an important strategy for improving retention, enhancing employee engagement, increasing joy in practice, and ultimately, improving quality of care. Informed by staff feedback yielded from focus groups and stakeholder interviews, Planetree will assist in establishing a committee that creates effective programs to meet employee needs. This committee will continue to drive meaningful engagement of employees and provide opportunities for the staff to feel cared for by the organization — so that they can, in turn, ensure your patients and families feel care for by your workforce.

Communication Skills Training

The training introduces participants to a series of behaviors and communication strategies for building trust, ensuring patients feel heard, and explaining things in a way patients and families will understand. Specific strategies covered include teach-back, motivational interviewing, reflective listening, and crucial conversation skills. Skills are introduced, role played, applied, observed, and debriefed to provide all participants with strategies they can apply immediately with patients and families.

Dementia Care Coaching

This session debunks the myth that individuals with dementia lack the ability to participate in choices related to their care. A Planetree coach will train staff on appropriate approaches to keeping the individual at the core of their care process, while enhancing the experience for caregiver, family, and patient.

HCAHPS Improvement Training

This service is a targeted, unit-based evaluation to identify factors that influence patient survey responses, levers for improvement, and solutions for enhancing the patient experience.

Executive Leadership Coaching

This personalized leadership coaching prepares and inspires leaders as agents of change who motivate staff and serve as champions to sustain momentum.

Medical Staff Programming

This programming educates and engages medical staff members in the person-centered care implementation effort, developing an approach for personally connecting clinicians to the change vision — customized to the culture and needs of your organization.

Management Coaching

This series of trainings provides managers with the tools necessary to lead from a relationship-based model of supervision. Middle managers are often the most overlooked or neglected group of supervisors in an organization, despite being the glue that binds culture change. This training is a key catalyst to meaningful change in your organization.

End of Life Care Coaching

End-of-life care is an inevitable but often avoided part of our healthcare system. For decades, death has been treated as one more task that needed to be completed by the staff. This program is designed to educate staff, identify preferences related to illness and end-of-life, create specific practices that support all stakeholders, and design programs that support staff and families in an ongoing manner.

Shared Decision Making Implementation

A growing body of research demonstrates the benefits of shared decision making on patient outcomes and healthcare costs — yet, many clinicians remain uncertain about what shared decision making really is and how to do it well. This workshop covers the fundamentals of shared decision making, including communication and coaching skills to support patients in decision-making, determine when it is appropriate to use decision aids, and help patients interpret risk information with proven techniques.

Your Partner In Person-Centered Care

While becoming certified as a Planetree Person-Centered Care Center is no small feat, the results — healthier, happier patients and staff, higher patient experience scores, and a reputation for excellence — are well worth the effort. Planetree is here to help you each step of the way, providing a true construct for caring and a clear on-ramp to Certification customized to your facility and community needs. Contact Planetree to learn more.

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