Patient Empowerment Research Paper

mpact on health status, satisfaction, self-efficacy and adherence.

2.1.0 Components of the empowerment process

WHO (2009), clearly specifies four components that are reported to be fundemental to the empowerment process, for instance: understanding of the patient’s role (patient participation), patients acquiring sufficient knoweledge to be able to engange fully with health providers, patient skills i.e self-efficacy and health literacy, and creation of a facilitating environment and positive deviance.

Patient participation:

Patients participate in health care by providing historical backgrounds about their health, giving themselves self-interest and motivation for a beneficial outcome and being physically present all times during care and

In addition, WHO, (2009) mentions the various experiences through which self efficacy can be made effective. They include the mastery experiences where previous successes will equip patient with a lot of skills; vicarious experience, where witnessing other individuals complete tasks successfully, increases self efficancy for an individual patient; verbal persuasion, which relates to the impact of encouragement on an individuals’ percieved self efficacy and psychological self efficacy like mood, emotionla state, physical reactions which influence one’s perception of self efficacy

Another important patient skill is health literacy. It is the ability to understand health information and use it to make good decisions about health and medical care (Koelen & Lindstrom, 2005). Lower health literancy is reported mostly among the elderly, less educated, poor who are characterised with increased rates of hospitalisation and high cost of care associated with lower health outcomes. (WHO, 2009)

Creation of a facilitating environment and positive

It is clearly understood that at each level of empowerment there is information sharing. It can take place among patients, between the patients and health care providers or patients communicating with some external agency/ advocate (Carrin, 2009). However, traditionally information sharing was based on grassroots and community programs, but the national public health campaign has changed this through direct to consumer advertising, email and internet. Though this mass media approach is cost effective, it lacks intimacy, partnership and follow up support. This easy access to information has greatly played a role in improving the doctor-patient relationship (Anderson et al.,