ABSTRACT
The care pathway tool can cover a variety of situations, in all care and support environments, ranging from the patient’s/user’s home to nursing homes, primary care and hospitals. Care pathways are multifaceted tools which can benefit the organisation using them in a number of ways. It is useful to make the distinction of process of development and use of the finished product in order to identify the benefits. One of the reasons for their popularity is that they are an all-encompassing tool which incorporate many of the different strands required to provide high-quality, effective and efficient healthcare in the UK. Care pathways are suitably structured to fill in the detail of the healthcare framework. They include a set of interventions for a specific condition or patient/user group, they can demonstrate the difference between what is planned and what is delivered, and they have the potential to span the continuum of care across organizational boundaries.
