Inaugural 2024 Australasian Forum on Person-Centred Value-Based Healthcare

September saw the inaugural Australasian Forum on Person-Centred Value-Based Health Care (PCVBHC) held at the Melbourne Convention Centre, organised by the Melbourne Medical School (MMS), Dental Health Services Victoria and Sprink UK.

This ground-breaking two-day event brought together leading speakers from around the world, focused on the theme: ‘How do we bring together Person-Centred Health Care, Value-Based Health Care and Health Equity?’

PCVBHC focuses on truly personalising approaches to care, quality measurement, resource allocation, and ultimately our understanding of value, through an emphasis on people’s individual values, goals, and preferences at the individual, organisational, and systemic levels.

Over 250 people attended drawn from diverse backgrounds including healthcare leaders, consumer representatives, policy decision makers, industry leaders, clinicians and healthcare professionals, carers, academics and students.

The main themes of the forum were:

• How to comprehend the values, goals, and preferences of individual patients and how these can shape the care they receive.
• Ensuring care is patient-centred by utilising strategies to ensure that patient values and preferences are at the forefront of care decisions.
• Providing insights to support health equity and address disparities in care.
• Developing knowledge on how to use data to better understand and measure the value of care delivered.

PCVBHC is a rapidly evolving arena, and we learned from leaders in the field, including Dr. Tom Kelley (CEO, Sprink UK), Prof. Shelley Dolan (CEO, RMH), Prof. Susan McKee (CEO, Dental Health Services Victoria), Prof. Christobel Saunders, Prof. Jane Gunn, and Prof. Jon Emery from MMS, Dr. Catherine Labinjoh (Scottish Government), Matt Zeller (Novartis), Adam Heathfield and Cecile Huyghe Garassus (Pfizer), Prof. Zoe Wainer (Dept. Health, Victoria), Elizabeth Koff (Telstra Health), Prof. Willem Jan Bos, and Dr. Marleen Kunneman (Leiden University, Netherlands).

All speakers and workshop hosts provided insights from their experiences and challenged the audience to identify areas where knowledge gaps persist in their organisations. The sessions covered topics including putting PCVBHC into practice, why we need to focus on goals and preferences, the value of existing evidence, exploring innovative practices and processes, suggestions for transformation of care, and learning from patients’ individual experiences.

The open forum sessions provided engaging and stimulating discussions with attendees sharing their own and their institutions’ experiences, as well as the roadblocks faced when trying to implement any aspect of PCVBHC.

We learnt that the essence for success is cultivating a culture that champions person-centred care and by strategically planning for transformation from the outset – ensuring that entrenched systems are broken down and shifting mindsets to align services to the individual needs of patients, rather than merely adhering to established norms, all of which are challenging in our current systems. The overarching conclusion was to ‘just start’.