Understanding how health professionals can develop high-quality relationships with the people they care for

“Developing trusting relationships with healthcare professionals is highly valued by healthcare users as well as their families and carers. It’s also important to health professionals, who want to connect meaningfully with their patients to provide high-quality care. But, too often in clinical practice, people experience poor-quality relationships that lead to poor care experiences or even adverse outcomes. Our goal is to generate evidence to help health professionals develop meaningful, trusting relationships with their patients across different care settings.”

– Feo

Relationships between healthcare users and professionals are central to high-quality care. They create positive care experiences and lead to better outcomes for healthcare users and can also positively impact health professionals’ work satisfaction and morale. These positive impacts then have flow-on effects, reducing unnecessary healthcare utilisation and cost and improving health workforce retention and turnover. However, relationships between healthcare users and professionals are often poorly developed and experienced.

Goal

To understand how we can enhance the development of high-quality relationships between healthcare users and professionals across contexts and clinical conditions.

Aims

To describe how healthcare users and their carers understand high-quality relationships and what is involved in their development, regardless of discipline, care setting and clinical condition.
To outline the key behaviours and strategies that health professionals can employ, regardless of their discipline or the context in which they are working, to develop high-quality relationships with the people they care for.