During Clinical Encounters

Helping patients with chronic conditions enhance the skills required to participate more actively in their health and healthcare has become a major part of what healthcare providers need to attend to in their interactions with patients. Some of this is done explicitly. Much is done implicitly.

However, helping people develop new skills and behaviors during brief clinical encounters is challenging, at best. For this reason, a growing number of health care organizations are making modifications in their delivery of care that make it possible to devote additional time and attention to supporting patient learning for self-management. (See the sorts of additional support, coaching and instruction described in Delivery System Design and Supporting Self-Management.) 

Supplemental Educational Activities

A number of practices and larger healthcare organizations have gone further, instituting additional educational programs carefully crafted to encourage and enable greater patient self-management and more effective collaboration between patients and their provider teams. Some programs of this kind are conducted by nurse practitioners and physicians assistants. Some are conducted quite successfully by medical assistants. And still others are conducted primarily or exclusively by peers – patients who have received training to lead educational and support classes. 

This section includes examples of the kind of recruitment and referral materials that have been developed to encourage patient and/or family member participation in such activities; training designs and instructor guidelines; agendas, workbooks and other hand outs given to participants; and forms used to document participation and assess impact/outcomes for a particular educational or learning support resource or intervention. 

Distribution of and Referral to Self-Instructional Resources

A third way that providers support patients working to improve their self-management skills is to give them or refer them to self-instructional resources, things they can take advantage of on their own, such as reminder checklists, handy forms, brief informational pieces, article reprints, books, workbooks, audiotapes, videotapes and website links. You will find a collection of such resources in the Patients and Family Members area of this website. (Additional items can be found at the IHI website). Many can be used as is. Others can be easily adapted to your particular context and purposes. The point is, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Many resources, generic and condition specific, are conveniently available for your use. 

All resources of this kind can be accessed directly and rapidly in the “Resources”section under the Patients and Families tab of this website. Resources, there, are organized in two ways.

1) By topic

2) By type of resource

Note that to find information or resources related to a particular topic, you can also use the “Search” and “Additional Search Options” functions, above right, accessible throughout this website.