Victoria, Seychelles, 6th July 2017 - Recently, the Seychelles has been spearheading its efforts to put in place coherent interventions aimed at improving the quality of person centred care. This concept is very well in accordance with WHO’s Health Systems Strengthening focus on improving quality of care where there is a coordination across a continuum of care, where all people have equal access to quality health services that meets their individual needs and all carers operate in a supportive environment. With this in mind, with the support of WHO, the three national health professionals councils in the country are once again hosting another important symposium on person-centred care (PCC).

The symposium is supported by the WHO and is being attended by some 150 participants including health professionals, policy makers, patient care groups, and representatives of the Civil Society. The special keynote speakers for this year are Dr. Anne Hendry, a Clinical Leader for Integrated Person Centred Care in Scotland and Dr. Janina Cathleen Johnson and Cecilia J Maier, Nurse Instructors from the Chamberlain College of Nursing in USA. The symposium is being facilitated by Dr. Nuria Polanco Toro from WHO/Geneva Service Delivery team, together with WHO/ Afro colleague Dr. Prosper Tumusiime.

The three day symposium was opened on 6th July 2017 in Victoria, Seychelles by the Minister for Health, Mr Jean Paul Adam in the presence of the Principal Secretary for Health, Dr. Bernard Valentin, the CEO of Health Care Agency, Dr. Danny Louange, and the WHO Liaison Officer for Seychelles, Dr. Bhupinder Aulakh. In his address Minister Adam emphasized on the importance of adopting a holistic approach to health care, and practicing good governance and accountability to achieve person-centered care. He urged participants to use the forum to discuss on benchmarking the country’s status against the most developed countries, raising current health standard and strengthening evidenced based practices to address determinants of health outcomes. Providing evidence-based decision making, he said, will allow the country to improve the contract of care that exist with patients and ultimately improve person-centered care. Minister Adam reiterated the Government’s commitment to person-centered care and to working towards achieving improvements in accountability, good governance and monitoring and evaluation across the health sector, improvements that he said will translate into real outcomes through person-centered care.

The WHO Liaison officer, Dr. Bhupinder Aulakh on the other hand complemented the country for taking the initiative to move from ‘patient-centered care’ to ‘individual person-centered care’. She urged the country to continue to aim for preventing individuals becoming patients, going beyond simply focusing on the treatment of diseases and health conditions to the adoption of a holistic approach to addressing the root causes, drivers and social determinants of health. She congratulated the country on all its good achievements which she say many countries of the world should follow and reiterated WHO’s commitment to continue to assist the country to further improve the health of Seychellois people. 

The three day symposium is another opportunity to sensitise the participants with the concepts of person-centered care, discuss on the barriers and challenges to PCC and agree on strategies for overcoming the various barriers. The results of two recent surveys conducted with the support of WHO in the country earlier in the year – the Patient Safety Situational Analysis (PSSA) and Service Availability and Readiness Assessment (SARA) will also be presented and discussed during the symposium. Various other presentations and deliberations on the global and regional perspectives on person-centered care and quality of health care, adoption of a life-course approach to person-centered care and the creation of appropriate conditions, assuring and measuring quality of care will also be discussed at length during the three days, before concluding on Saturday 8th afternoon with various recommendations and action points for the country to follow up on.

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For more information, please contact:

Doreen Hotive (Mrs), NPO/HIP Officer, Tel: (248) 4224795, Fax: (248) 225754, Email: hotived [at] who.int