Patient Priorities Care
When several conditions, symptoms, treatments and appointments overlap, health care can become another source of work. It can be difficult to tell which recommendations matter most, which are worth the effort and what should happen first.
Patient Priorities Care offers another starting point: what do you most want your health care to help you do, and what are you willing and able to do to get there?
Find my priorities → Take this to an appointment →The goal is not simply to do more health care.
Patient Priorities Care is an evidence-based approach developed especially for people managing multiple chronic conditions. It helps identify a person’s own health priorities and align health-care decisions with them.
What matters most to me — and what health care am I willing and able to do to help me get there?
This can be especially useful when there is no single perfect option, when treatments compete with each other, or when the work of managing health is becoming too much.
Learn about Patient Priorities Care →What do I want my health care to make possible?
A health priority is more than a diagnosis or target number. It connects health care with the life, activities and outcomes that matter to the person.
What matters to me?
What gives life meaning, comfort, connection, independence, enjoyment or purpose?
What do I want to be able to do?
Think about a meaningful and realistic activity or outcome you would like your health care to help make possible.
What is getting in the way?
Symptoms, fatigue, pain, treatment burden, side effects, sensory load, mobility, anxiety, cognition or another barrier.
What is most burdensome?
Which symptom, treatment, medication, appointment or health-care task is making life hardest right now?
What am I willing to do?
Some treatments or tasks may feel worthwhile because they help reach an important goal. Others may not.
What am I able to do?
Time, energy, cognition, money, sensory load, support and competing demands all affect what is feasible.
Four questions can change the direction of care.
These can move a consultation from “Here is everything you should do” toward “Which care is most useful for this person now?”
Health care has a workload.
Treatment burden is the work health care places on a person and their care partners — and the effect that work has on everyday life.
The burden may come from many small things adding together.
What would you most like help with first?
Patient Priorities Care uses the idea of identifying a top health priority — often the health problem, symptom, health-care task or treatment that feels most burdensome and most interferes with the person’s goals.
This does not make other concerns unimportant. It gives the care team somewhere useful to begin when too many things compete for attention.
- “I want enough energy to have dinner with my family.”
- “The dizziness is stopping me leaving home.”
- “I need my medication routine to be simpler.”
- “I want to sleep without spending the next day sedated.”
- “I cannot keep managing this many appointments.”
Not every recommendation has the same priority.
When several conditions overlap, recommendations can compete for time, energy and attention. Making the trade-offs explicit can prevent the person being left to manage them alone.
Does this help with what matters most to me?
Ask what outcome the intervention is intended to improve and whether that outcome connects with the person’s own goals.
What benefit are we hoping for?
Ask what improvement is realistically expected, how likely it is, how long it may take and how you would know whether it is helping.
What will this ask me to do?
Include the whole workload: appointments, travel, exercises, monitoring, medication changes, preparation, side effects, paperwork and recovery time.
What are the trade-offs?
A treatment may improve one outcome while making another harder.
Trade-offs are part of individualised decision-making when several important needs compete.
Could we simplify?
Ask whether tasks can be combined, reduced, automated, coordinated, delegated or stopped if they are no longer helping enough to justify the burden.
Could we try it and review?
A time-limited trial can define what you are trying, what outcome matters, what burden is acceptable and when the decision will be reviewed.
The right priority can change with capacity.
ALPIMS adds another question: what kind of response fits the person’s capacity now?
Reduce
The useful intervention may be reducing unnecessary treatment, administration, sensory load or competing demands.
Explore Reduce →Pace
Health-care tasks need to fit real physical, cognitive, emotional, sensory and social capacity.
Explore Pace →Expand
When capacity allows, care can support participation, skills, meaningful activity and greater involvement in life.
Explore Expand →A short way to explain your priorities.
You do not need to explain your whole health history before talking about what matters most.
Before the appointment, I could write down:
The life or health outcome I most want help with.
The symptom, limitation or task creating the biggest problem.
Treatment, appointments, self-management or another demand.
What feels manageable — and what currently does not.
Side effects, worsening symptoms, cost, overload or another risk.
The one question I most need the appointment to answer.
Related pages
Patient Priorities Care resources
Patient Priorities Care provides resources for patients, care partners and health professionals.
Patient Priorities Care → Frequently Asked Questions → My Health Priorities → Clinician Learning — ACP →Good care should help make the person’s life more possible.
A guideline can tell us what might help a condition. A clinician can explain benefits, risks and options. The person living the life brings another essential part of the decision: what matters, what is burdensome and what they are willing and able to do.
What matters? What is hard? What is possible? What should we prioritise now?
Return to ALPIMS → Professional Care →ALPIMS provides general information and practical support ideas. This page does not replace individual medical assessment or professional advice. Treatment decisions, including starting, stopping or changing medications or other health care, should be discussed with an appropriately qualified health professional. Patient Priorities Care is an external approach; ALPIMS is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Patient Priorities Care program.