Effective communication is central to providing quality care. This resource map demonstrates the importance of a patient-centred approach, which emphasizes respect, empathy, and shared decision-making, ensuring that each patient’s values, needs, and preferences help guide clinical decisions. Interprofessional collaboration involves delivering patient care through a team-based approach, where professionals from diverse health care backgrounds work together. Integrating this collaborative model into health care settings allows various disciplines to function more cohesively, leading to improved patient outcomes and a more efficient work environment.
The Medical Council of Canada (MCC) Examination Objectives describe the attributes expected of medical graduates entering residency in Canada. This resource map is associated with the following Objectives:
This list of objectives reflects the main themes in this resource map and is not exhaustive.
Some of the resources listed below are specific to particular provinces or regions and are not always generalizable to all of Canada. We encourage you to seek out specific resources for your own needs.
The patient-centred approach
This document describes a patient-centred approach as the clinical method established by the Centre for Studies in Family Medicine at The University of Western Ontario. The method sets out to understand a patient’s presenting problem through learning about the disease and how the individual experiences it. One must learn what patients feel in connection to their symptoms, how they explain what they are experiencing, the effect it is having on their lives, and how they hope the physician will be able to help to address the problem.
Patient-centred communication
This website outlines the characteristics of patient-centred communication. It emphasizes the importance of engaging with patients so as to create a mutual understanding about how the physician’s thoughts and the proposed care meet the patient’s expectations, interests and needs from their individual perspectives. It provides good practice guidance and discusses challenges to communication.
Read this resource (approx. 18 min)
Interprofessional collaboration in health care
This article discusses health care collaboration as a key strategy for health care reform. Collaboration in health care has been shown to improve patient outcomes such as reducing preventable adverse drug reactions, decreasing morbidity and mortality rates and optimizing medication dosages. Teamwork has also been shown to provide benefits to health care providers, including reducing extra work and increasing job satisfaction.
WHY Interprofessional Collaborative Practice?
This video briefly covers the outcomes of interprofessional collaborative practice.
Other resources you may want to explore:
Toward a patient-centred health care system, Canadian Family Physician journal article
English for the Workplace: Doing Patient-Centred Care in Medical Communication, TESL Canada journal article
About the Person-Centred Care Guideline, Ontario Health (Cancer Care Ontario)
The Patient’s Medical Home, College of Family Physicians of Canada
