Person Centered Care: Which Person? What Care? Equity Dilemmas through a marginalized Patient Lens

Patient centered care is an important pillar of innovative integrated approaches for quality improvement of healthcare systems and capacity building context for all healthcare stakeholders. Yet critical questions remain unexplored in the approach, relating to (a) assumptions about largely homogeneous nature of patients and (b) evaluation of the relevance of care within the patient unique social contexts. In reality, patients -globally - are neither a homogeneous community or a monolithic entity. The inadequate recognition of diversities of contexts, particularly in sub groups of vulnerable patient population within the fast changing social determinants of their wellbeing, remain a serious challenge for innovations; it often limits their intent for transforming the system into disparate initiatives for reforms, addressing traditional features of healthcare delivery within the customary standards of historical silos that characterized the system in the past. The proposed networking session focused on the pillars of Shared Values and Peron centered Care, aims to facilitate a meaningful dialogue related to complex dilemmas of Innovations in Integrated Care. It focuses on exploring sustainable goals of patient partnership to enhance innovations that acknowledge the need for embedding diversity, inclusion, equity and access in design, delivery and evaluation within approaches of integrated healthcare. * Esha Ray Chaudhuri is a Patient Advocate and Health Equity Analyst in Calgary, Canada