18
THE ROLE OF PATIENT VALUE AND PATIENT-CENTRED
CARE IN HEALTH SYSTEMS
If a country that has more than a third of the “high” results in our scorecard is clearly still seeing such
limited transformation toward patient-centred care, most others will have very far to go. France and
the US, for example, tend to have fewer “high” results, while the rest of Western Europe trails further
behind, but ahead of Brazil and the Asian countries.Italy sits near the middle of these, and what Ms Sofia says about that country seems to apply more
widely: “In the last ten years, patient-centricity has been much discussed. I see and read a lot about the
possible role of patients in improving outcomes and patient-centricity is increasingly recognised as [a]
way to contain expenditure. However, my impression is that currently it is still a buzzword. We have not
given the patient a key role in the system itself.”Looking beyond the results, the scorecard highlights three further challenges that will need to be
overcome for progress to occur:
a dichotomy between policy aspiration and practice;
another dichotomy between general health system access and personalised care; and
a weakness in measurement and the kind of metrics being used.These are discussed in turn in the following sections.