The Role of Acting Participants, Definitions, and the Determining Factors of Adherence to Treatment from Two Perspectives: The Biomedical Model and the Chronic Care Model

Management of chronic illness implies significant changing the lifestyle, taking medication, watching the diet, introducing and maintaining exercise in daily life, etc. These actions represent elements of adherence to treatment and they reflect the responsibility of patient’s participation to healthcare. The increase in adherence to treatment and in the quality of care, implicitly, may depend on allotting the resources necessary within therapeutic effort and on the effectiveness of the partnership between patient and doctor. Assuming the medical decision as a team may lead to solving the issue of non-adherence (Armstrong, 2014). Whereas the values of the functional parameters of the body represent an objective measurement of treatment efficiency and to some extent of adherence to it, implicitly, assessing the patient’s lifestyle involves understanding his experience, which is governed by subjectivity. This article has the following objectives: (1) to analyze the definitions of adherence to treatment from a biomedical perspective and from the perspective of Chronic Care Model (CCM); (2) to identify the characteristics specific to the roles of acting participants to healthcare and to analyze the modifications of roles by the choice of theoretical model and (3) to identify the determining factors of adherence to treatment.