Patient empowerment : creating effective partnerships between the patient and the healthcare delivery chain
Author(s)
Haus, MatthiasKeywords
Doctor patient relationEmpowerment
Explosion
Health care delivery
Human experiment
Responsibility
Healthcare delivery chain (HCDC)
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http://hdl.handle.net/2263/62298Abstract
The delivery of healthcare has, over the past 2 500 years, been firmly entrenched in the domain of the
 physician. Since the ‘Father of Medicine’, Hippocrates (470 BC) created his vision for just, moral and ethical
 standards of administering and providing medical care for his patients, the information flow and decision-making
 responsibility has resided uniquely and solely in the formal and traditionally established physician-driven
 medical system. Patients were grateful, uninformed, unimpowered and entirely dependent on their physician’s
 judgement, intent, knowledge and goodwill. In this role, the medical caregiver’s image was akin to a god-like
 figure. Recently, however, during the explosion of the information and technology era, patients have been
 taking a more inclusive interest in their health and the various treatment options available to them. This
 article examines the benefits, risks, ethical dilemmas and emerging processes being offered to promote
 patient empowerment, and also proposes three different novel categories of empowerment programmes
 which could be to the benefit of all stakeholders in the healthcare delivery chain (HCDC).http://www.journals.co.za/content/journal/caci
am2017
Paediatrics and Child Health
Date
2017-09-19Type
ArticleIdentifier
oai:repository.up.ac.za:2263/62298http://hdl.handle.net/2263/62298
Haus, M. 2017, 'Patient empowerment : creating effective partnerships between the patient and the healthcare delivery chain', Current Allergy and Clinical Immunology, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 6-10.
1609-3607 (online)