"Patients
prescribe E5 for sustainable health systems" That's
the tagline for a year-long patient-empowerment campaign launched in May by the
European Patients Forum, a coalition of organizations representing 150 million
patients. The
Europeans, and the British, too, are looking at empowerment as a financial
imperative. And we should, too. Here's the problem: traditional healthcare systems were designed for infectious
disease. Treatment fitting the disease was prescribed and managed by
professionals while patients complied and were cured or died. That
disease-focused model prevails but cannot sustain treatment of modern chronic
conditions and aging populations where treatment needs differ, treatment
options are complex, patients self-manage and live decades with their
conditions. Health
Literacy: an aspect of empowerment The
campaign defines patient empowerment as a process that helps people gain control
over their own lives and increases their capacity to act on issues that they themselves define as important.” Heath literacy is considered an aspect of empowerment; it
helps people gain control over their health and its determinants. Information and resources are
considered tools for empowerment. If we consider information and
services as tools for empowerment, how would we design them differently? What
if the purpose of Informed Consent was to empower patient choice rather than
legally protect providers? The
five “Es” of Empowerment: • Education: patients can make informed decisions
about their health if they are able to access all the relevant information, in
an easily understandable format. • Expertise: patients self-manage their
condition every day so they have a unique expertise on healthcare which needs
to be supported. • Equality: patients need support
to become equal partners with health professionals in the management of their
condition. • Experience: individual patients work with patient
organizations to represent them, and channel their experience and collective
voice. • Engagement: patients need to be involved in
designing more effective healthcare for all, and in research to deliver new and
better treatments and services Patient
empowerment is a challenge for professionals, too All
the European stakeholders, including health professionals, agreed that a major
barrier to achieving the five Es
is health professionals' attitudes. This is not surprising, and it's
likely the same in the US. Special
knowledge has been a source of power and status for physicians for
centuries. Health education curricula is defined but de-funded in most schools
so patients often lack essential knowledge. Skills to collaborate with less knowledgeable patients as
respected, equal partners with useful expertise are not developed in medical
school. And there is never enough time. Content
analysis of US health literacy
discourse suggests that here, as in Europe, professional attitudes inhibit
patient empowerment. The term
empowerment is rarely mentioned. Patients are described' as
"difficult", "hard-to-reach" or "illiterate",
with "inadequate" or "marginal" skills, who
"fail" to comply or "just don't care". If empowering the patient was part of
every treatment plan, how would we describe patients differently? What would we do differently? Learn more about the
Patient Empowerment Campaign here http://www.eu-patient.eu/campaign/PatientsprescribE/ . Follow them at @PatientsprescribE |
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