Organizational capacity for patient and family engagement in hospital planning and improvement: interviews with patient/family advisors, managers and clinicians

Background Patient and family engagement (PE) in healthcare planning and improvement achieves beneficial outcomes and is widely advocated, but a lack of resources is a critical barrier. Little prior research studied how organizations support engagement specifically in hospitals. Objective We explored what constitutes hospital capacity for engagement. Methods We conducted descriptive qualitative interviews and complied with criteria for rigour and reporting in qualitative research. We interviewed patient/family advisors, engagement managers, clinicians and executives at hospitals with high engagement activity, asking them to describe essential resources or processes. We used content analysis and constant comparison to identify themes and corresponding quotes and interpreted findings by mapping themes to two existing frameworks of PE capacity not specific to hospitals. Results We interviewed 40 patient/family advisors, patient engagement managers, clinicians and corporate executives from nine hospitals (two Conclusion The findings build on prior research that largely focused on PE in individual clinical care or research or in primary care planning and improvement. The findings closely aligned with existing frameworks of organizational capacity for PE not specific to hospital settings, which suggests that hospitals could use the blended framework to plan, evaluate and improve their PE programs. Further research is needed to yield greater insight into how to promote and enable compensation for patient/family advisors and the role of clinician or staff champions in supporting PE.