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Patient & Family Advisory Council Playbook
Guidance, templates, and kits to set up PFACs that co‑design care, build trust, and drive practical service improvements.
Patient & Family Advisory Council Playbook
Practical, step‑by‑step guidance and ready-to-use templates to start, run, and sustain PFACs that move patient and family input into real improvement—without tokenism.
Why a PFAC matters
Patients and families hold practical knowledge about care, access, communication, and safety that teams rarely capture with surveys alone. A well-structured PFAC creates a predictable channel for lived experience to inform service design, reduce harm, improve access and equity, and rebuild trust—from emergency departments and primary care clinics to long‑term care and home health teams.
What this playbook helps you do
Use this resource to: craft a clear charter and terms of reference; recruit and onboard a diverse and representative membership; design inclusive, accessible meetings and agendas; define roles, compensation, confidentiality, and conflict‑of‑interest guidance; link PFAC recommendations to quality improvement or operational owners; and set measures to track follow‑through and impact.
Who benefits
PFACs are useful for hospitals, outpatient clinics, community health centers, long‑term care facilities, hospice and home health programs, behavioral health services, and health system quality and patient experience teams. Frontline clinicians, care managers, administrators, improvement leads, and patient partners all gain clearer roles and predictable pathways from feedback to action.
What's in this collection
This resource bundles practical artifacts you can adapt to your setting: a PFAC Charter Template and Meeting Kit, multiple PFAC Launch & Establishment Playbooks, a Startup Kit, and recruitment, terms of reference, and meeting toolkits—designed so teams can copy, tailor, and operate PFACs as living parts of their improvement ecosystem.
Practical examples
- A community hospital uses the Charter Template and Meeting Kit to formalize a PFAC that reviews discharge instructions and reduces readmission confusion.
- A primary care network adapts the Launch Kit to recruit caregivers who co-design appointment access improvements.
- A long‑term care provider uses the Terms of Reference and recruitment tools to ensure residents and family members participate with accessible meeting formats and appropriate compensation.
Avoiding common pitfalls
Design PFACs to prevent tokenism: set transparent decision pathways, assign accountable owners for recommendations, budget for engagement (including compensation and accessibility), protect privacy, and measure follow‑through. Make membership representative, rotate leadership, and embed PFAC work into existing QI or operational workflows so feedback becomes action rather than an isolated conversation.
Make it a living capability
Think of your PFAC playbook as a living collection: tailor templates to local policies, document meeting outcomes where owners can act on them, and track simple measures (e.g., recommendation completion, participant diversity, satisfaction with meetings). If you use platform capabilities, consider turning checklists into interactive forms and storing meeting summaries as structured data so insights feed dashboards and improvement workflows.
Start with the Charter Template and Launch Kit to draft roles and a first agenda. Use the Meeting Kit for your first three sessions and agree on how recommendations will be routed into quality or operations. If you need help tailoring materials to your setting, consider copying this collection into an organizational domain and adapting membership, measures, and workflows to fit your policies and populations.
Make useful resources part of something bigger.
The Hunger Engine is moving toward living domains, toolkits, and collections that people and organizations can explore, acquire, tailor, extend, and improve. A useful resource can become part of a personal collection, team toolbox, site-specific domain, or shared enterprise capability.
Start with what you're hungry to improve. As your needs grow, collections can bring together knowledge, audits, forms, dashboards, data, AI, integrations, and other capabilities without requiring you to start from scratch.