Pamela Wescott, MPP is the Director of Patient Perspectives for the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, a non-profit organization with the mission to inform and amplify the patient’s voice in health care decisions. Before joining the Foundation, Pam managed research initiatives for Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Radcliffe Public Policy Institute, and she taught focus group methodology to Harvard undergraduates and Harvard Law students. Ms. Wescott has a BA from Wellesley College and a Master’s in Public Policy from the University of California at Berkeley.
Since joining the Foundation in 1998, Pam has been responsible for managing patient perspective content development for over 30 decision aids created by the Foundation in partnership with Health Dialog, a provider of healthcare decision support. She conducts focus groups and individual interviews with patients and providers around the United States, and helps ensure that their insights inform different stages of program development. She has helped to create videos to promote shared decision making, including “Transforming the Patient Experience,” which received International Health and Medical Media recognition.
Pam’s role has included collaborations with the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention on a “Community Voices” video that explored how differences in culture, race and ethnicity affect health, and the Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education, NYC, on whether an Informed Health Consumer decision aid could be effective in an underserved, multiracial population. The latter project resulted in interviews with community-based primary care providers whose observations are being prepared for web viewing along with patients describing Shared Decision Making as they have experienced it.
When her father was dying at home, Pam wrote a memoir, “Serving Life,” for which she was a Finalist for the Bakeless Nonfiction Literary Publication Prize at the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference. She has since published “The Love that Shouted for Joy,” a memoir about marrying her partner Kathleen in Massachusetts in 2004.