Empowering patients in the management of chronic diseases

EPF participates in the EMPATHiE tender “EMpowering PAtients in the management of chronic diseases”. The tender will try to achieve a common understanding of the concept of patient empowerment and identify good practices, success factors and barriers.

Currently, there is not a single definition widely accepted for patient empowerment. The EMPATiE Consortium will use the following working definition as a starting point: “A process that enables people to gain control over their own lives and health, and increases the capacity of people to act on issues that they themselves define as important”.

Empowerment processes aim to equip patients and their informal caregivers, whenever appropriate, with the capacity to participate in decisions related to their condition to the extent that they wish to do so.

The consortium is composed of centres of expertise in their fields with extensive experience in patient empowerment, including the European Network on Patient Empowerment (ENOPE) which we are now members of. We will represent the patients’ voice together with complementary partners such as health professionals, academics and experts in health education.

The activities are organised into four work packages. The first two Work Packages (WP) constitute the ‘analysis phase’, and the last two constitute the ‘transferability phase’. EPF will lead WP 4 to define possible scenarios for European collaboration in this area.

Several EPF member organisations in different countries are involved directly in this tender funded by the Executive Agency for Health and Consumers (EAHC), part of the European Commission. Additionally, all our members will have an opportunity to input in an online survey on this topic and we will contact members at a later stage about this.

The outcomes of the project will inform the future development of EU policies for patient-centred healthcare, particularly in the context of the EU ‘Reflection process on chronic disease’ (see our contribution paper, 2012).

The tender plans to produce its report by mid-September 2014.

For more information, please contact Kaisa Immonen-Charalambous, Senior Policy Adviser, at  kaisa.immonen.charalambous@eu-patient.eu.