Parity: (im) possible? Interplay of knowledge forms in patient education

Primary healthcare professionals' experience with patient participation in healthcare service development: A qualitative study

Objective

How healthcare professionals experience patient participation in health service development impacts its use. This participatory study explores primary healthcare professionals' perceptions of developing health services with patient representatives.

Methods

Four focus group interviews with primary healthcare professionals (n = 26) were conducted. We analyzed data by applying Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis.

Results

The healthcare professionals perceived having a complementary interprofessional relationship with the patient representatives and regarded them as colleagues. However, the professionals navigated between a position of authority and collaboration, reconciling the need for participation with its challenges, e.g., to identify the representatives' collective representation among their personal experience, to ensure a more evidence-informed result that they and their colleagues would endorse.

Conclusions

Regarding patient representatives as colleagues can blur the line between professionals and representatives' positions and functions and further complicate health service development. Our results indicate a need for skilled facilitators to lead the process.

Innovation

This study identifies issues that professionals are uncertain about when collaborating with representatives to develop primary healthcare services; difficulties that professionals must overcome to collaborate constructively with representatives. Our findings can inform healthcare professionals' education about patient participation on all levels. We have suggested topics to address.

User involvement as sharing knowledge - an extended perspective in patient education

Background

Patient education is undergoing a paradigm shift in which the perspectives of patients are increasingly being incorporated into learning programs. Access to the users’ experience is now considered a prerequisite for the development of quality health services, but how this user experience is incorporated is somewhat unclear. The inclusion of experiential knowledge and user involvement can challenge professional authority, roles, and working methods because knowledge sharing is different from persuasion, professional explanation, and consent. Dialogue and collaboration between professionals and users are essential to effective user involvement; however, little is understood about the characteristics of their collaboration.

Objective

To describe characteristics of the collaboration between users and health professionals in developing, implementing, and evaluating patient education courses in hospitals.

Design, setting, and methods

A field study was conducted in three different hospitals. Data collection comprised open observations in meetings of 17 different collaboration groups with a total of 100 participants, and 24 interviews with users and professionals. The data analyses included both thematic and the Systematic Data Integration approach.

Results

Two contrasting types of collaboration emerged from the analyses; knowledge sharing and information exchange. The first was characterized by mutual knowledge sharing, involvement, and reciprocal decision making. Characteristics of the second were the absence of dialogue, meagre exploration of the users’ knowledge, and decisions usually made by the professionals.

Conclusion

Collaboration between users and health personnel takes place in an asymmetric relationship. Mutual knowledge sharing was found to be more than the exchange of information and consultation and also to be a prerequisite for shared decision making. In developing patient education when users are involved the health professionals have the power and responsibility to ensure that knowledge sharing with users takes place.

Listening with care: using narrative methods to cultivate nurses' responsive relationships in a home visiting intervention with teen mothers

Effective public health nursing relies on the development of responsive and collaborative relationships with families. While nurse-family relationships are endorsed by home visitation programs, training nurses to follow visit-to-visit protocols may unintentionally undermine these relationships and may also obscure nurses' clinical understanding and situated knowledge. With these issues in mind, we designed a home-visiting intervention, titled Listening with Care, to cultivate nurses' relationships with teen mothers and nurses' clinical judgment and reasoning. Rather than using protocols, the training for the intervention introduced nurses to narrative methods and therapeutic tools. This mixed-method pilot study included a quasi-experimental design to examine the effect of the intervention on teen mothers' depressive symptoms, self-silencing, repeat pregnancy, and educational progress compared to teens who received usual care. Qualitative data were collected from the nurses to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of the intervention and therapeutic tools. The nurses endorsed the therapeutic tools and expected to continue using them in their practice. Despite the lack of statistically significant differences in outcomes between groups, findings suggest that further study of the intervention is warranted. Future studies may have implications for strengthening hidden aspects of nursing that make a difference in the lives of teen mothers.