Strategies for healthcare professionals to facilitate patient illness understanding

Aims and objectives To describe how healthcare professionals facilitate patient illness understanding. Background Healthcare professionals and patients differ in their illness understanding. If the information provided by healthcare professionals is not adapted to the patient's daily life, it may be unusable for the patient. Previous research has found that healthcare professionals should individualise the information to enable the patient to apply the knowledge to the personal situation and to develop illness understanding. However, little is known of how healthcare professionals can facilitate patient illness understanding. Method A qualitative descriptive study based on individual, semi‐structured, open‐ended and face‐to‐face interviews was conducted with healthcare professionals (n = 11) concerning how they facilitate patients illness understanding. Three health centres were involved during the period of March to November 2014. The interviews were analysed with qualitative content analysis. Results The result identified a continuous and collaborative process with three strategies used by healthcare professionals to facilitate the patient's illness understanding: (i) assess the patient's illness understanding, (ii) interact with the patient to develop illness understanding and (iii) support the patient's personal development for illness understanding. The steps in the process depend on each other. Conclusions The results of our analysis indicate that healthcare professionals can use the continuous and collaborative process to enhance the patient's self‐care ability and turn his or her knowledge into action for improving illness understanding. Relevance to clinical practice The three continuous and collaborative process strategies involving pedagogical approaches can create conditions for healthcare professionals to obtain a holistic view of the patient's life and to be a key resource for person‐centred care.