by Nick Jacobs

Planetree is a non-profit membership organization working with hospitals and healthcare centers to develop and implement patient-centered care in healing environments. (www.planetree.org)

Our journey to implement the Planetree Philosophy has been an interesting and enlightening experience. Because Windber Medical Center had the first rural Hospice in Pennsylvania, it was immediately apparent that the staff and board had already embraced the primary philosophy of caring that exemplified the Planetree Model. Patient empowerment, respect for the family, and the total acceptance of spirituality, the arts, and patient centered care were all a part of the Hospice tradition.

What we envisioned was an expansion of this philosophy throughout our entire facility. Our hospital is now the best of a hospital, the best of a hotel and the best of a spa. It’s truly an environment that encourages healing, convenience and comfort, not only for the patient, but also for the family as well.

We encourage healing and comfort in all dimensions: physical, emotional, spiritual, and social. We provide patient –centered care in a homelike atmosphere that includes music therapy, bread making, therapeutic massage and meditation, aromatherapy to name just a few. Planetree is about a softer, gentler, warmer way of caring for people. It’s about sensitivity.

The implementation process is an ongoing process. There have always been those who didn’t want to come on board, and it took us three years to establish and implement evaluation criteria that enabled us to encourage some of those employees to move on because they were not willing to accept this philosophy.

A major key to implementing Planetree was to use our employees to provide continued training. This process assisted us in gaining the employee buy-in, the key element to a successful implementation.

Our patients and their families have noticed the difference, our physicians have noticed the difference and our statistics have shown the difference. Our length of stay has shortened, our patient satisfaction has increased and our employee morale has stayed high. Most importantly, however, our inpatient and outpatient numbers have grown each year.

It doesn’t take the construction of new facilities to become a Planetree facility; it’s truly a philosophy of care, of patient empowerment, of creating a healing environment. What it really takes is the dedication of the all leadership to believe that patient-centered care is the only kind of care your facility should provide. Patients should NOT have to leave their dignity at the door.

UPDATE: See this post for a 5-minute video of Nick explaining this process in more detail.