Tessa Richards: Forget fashion—go for value

How much of the care patients receive is determined by their doctor’s decision to provide it as opposed to their need and preference for it? And how much money might be saved if investigations and treatments of limited or no value to patients were stopped? These questions were debated at two recent meetings on practice […]

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Tessa Richards: Who is defining patient-centred care?

If the reality of patient care matched the rhetoric of the average “patient-centred” NHS provider it wouldn’t have been necessary for NICE to produce formal guidance on how to improve the patient’s experience of care, a recent BMJ editorial suggests. Nor would an international literature review of the indicators used to measure patient-centred care have […]

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