Chronic diseases are identified as challenges to the sustainability of European health systems since the growth in the scale of chronic diseases caused by the ageing of the population and increasing life expectancy is calling for greater investment and effective satisfaction of patient needs and expectations. Meanwhile, scientific papers demonstrate a common agreement that in this context a paradigmatic shift in the attitude to patients with chronic diseases – from orientation towards the disease to that towards the patient as an active health care partner – is important. The patient as an active partner can self-manage the disease, take rational decisions on a daily basis to ensure health behaviour. Such behaviour of patients with chronic diseases would reduce the financial burden on the health care sector. The essential precondition for self-management of chronic disease is patient empowerment. Patients are empowered to take self-management decisions and be responsible primarily when they have necessary knowledge and skills related to their disease. The scientific problem of project KEmpow rests on creation of a strategic tool for patient knowledge empowerment for self-management in a form of scenarios integrating patterns of development of patient knowledge enablers and adequate knowledge management solutions for self-management. Taking into consideration the fact that self-management of disease is one of priorities for the European Commission and that patient knowledge empowerment is the most important precondition for self-management of disease, the implementation of project KEmpow would contribute to the management/containment of sustainability challenge to European health systems by solving the issue of the transformed patient role. In addition, implementation of scientific research activities is significant to improving scholars’ and researchers’ qualifications by tackling the problems of interdisciplinarity, international collaboration and training of best qualified academic staff.
Project funding:
This research project is funded by the European Social Fund according to the 2014–2020 Operational Programme for the European Union Funds’ Investments, under measure’s No. 09.3.3-LMT-K-712 activity “Promotion of postdoctoral fellowships studies”.
Project results:
The main result of project KEmpow rests on creation of a strategic tool for patient knowledge empowerment for self-management in a form of scenarios integrating patterns of development of patient knowledge enablers and adequate knowledge management solutions for self-management.
Period of project implementation: 2020-09-01 - 2022-11-30
Project coordinator: Kaunas University of Technology
