Patient engagement

Background and Objective: The increasing prevalence of food allergy affects both patients and their families.

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of an online educational program designed for parents and caregivers of children with food allergies. The program was developed by a multidisciplinary group comprising health care professionals, researchers, and expert patients under the participatory medicine model.

Background: Co-production has been widely recognised as a potential means to reduce the dissatisfaction of citizens, the inefficacy of service providers, and conflicts in relations between the former and the latter. However, the benefits of co-production has begun to be questioned: co-production has often been taken for granted, and its effects may not be effective. To understand and prevent unsuccessful citizen and provider collaboration, the recent literature has begun to focus on the causes of co-destruction.

Background: Family caregivers are key actors in the ageing society. They are mediators between practitioners and patients and usually provide also essential daily services for the elders. However, till now, few services have been deployed to help caregivers in their care tasks as in improving their mental health which can experience sever burden due to caregiving duties.

Background: Cardiac surgery is becoming increasingly common in older, more vulnerable adults. A focus on timely and complete medical and functional recovery has led to the development of enhanced recovery protocols (ERPs) for a number of surgical procedures and subspecialties, including cardiac surgery (ERAS® Cardiac). An element that is often overlooked in the development and implementation of ERPs is the involvement of key stakeholder groups, including surgery patients and caregivers (e.g., family and/or friends).

Background and Objectives Informal caregivers are rarely as involved as they want to be in the housing decisions of cognitively impaired older adults. Lack of awareness of available options and their benefits and risks may lead to decisions that do not reflect older adults' preferences, and to guilt and regret. We assessed the effect of training home care teams in interprofessional shared decision-making (SDM) on the proportion of caregivers who report being active in this decision.

Background: US research organizations increasingly are supporting patient and stakeholder engagement in health research with a goal of producing more useful, relevant and patient-centered evidence better aligned with real-world clinical needs.

Successful management of diabetic foot ulceration (DFU) is crucial for preventing long-term morbidity and lowering risk of amputations. This can be achieved with a multifaceted approach involving a multidisciplinary team, with the patient at the centre. However, not all healthcare setups enable this, and the rate of lower limb amputations continues to rise. It is therefore time to consider new approaches to diabetic foot care, capitalising on engagement from patients in self-management while supported by their informal caregivers (ICGs) to help improve outcome.

Background and Objectives Caregivers need to understand their health status and the disabilities of the care recipient to engage in effective health management. Infographics tailored with personal health data are a promising approach to facilitating comprehension, particularly for individuals with low health literacy/limited English proficiency. Such approaches may be especially important for dementia caregivers given the high care burden.

Background: With patient and public engagement in many aspects of the healthcare system becoming an imperative, the recruitment of patients and members of the public into service and research roles has emerged as a challenge. The existing literature carries few reports of the methods – successful and unsuccessful – that researchers engaged in user-centred design (UCD) projects are using to recruit participants as equal partners in co-design research.