Modelling Patient Engagement in Healthcare: Insight for Research and Practice

Living with an illness is an ongoing, continually shifting process in which people experience a complex dialectic between themselves and their healthcare context. Patient engagement in their care is a dynamic, evolutionary process that involves moving from a disease-centric model, to the maximization of individual potentialities-even with the disease-and the recovery of some form of life project. In this chapter, the authors outline a theoretical model (PHE model) that explains the subjective experience patients go through to become engaged in their health management process and the factors that may enact the transition from one phase to the next in the process itself. This view of the patient engagement process suggests that a fully engaged patient status is the final outcome of a series of emotional, cognitive, and behavioural reframing of one’s health condition, and the success of the patient at each phase of the process depends on the success of the previous phase. The last phase of the engagement process culminates in a patient who has gained a positive approach to health management and has recaptured an active role in society by re-establishing plans for wellbeing. Such a patient has succeeded in incorporating disease management into their life. The model described is also a useful course of action to innovate healthcare services and practices in a more engaging way.