When caring for chronically ill people means caring for a genuine education

Caring for chronically ill people, who are particularly vulnerable and fragile, is strictly interconnected with educational interventions, which are crucial to learning to manage chronic diseases. Healthcare professionals, especially nurses, know the importance of patient education in caring for chronic diseases, but they often reduce that educational practice to a teaching intervention. To better manage their disease, many patients need information and even skills, but they often also need to be supported by healthcare professionals in the difficult task of coming to terms with their illness and embedding their sickness into their identity. Our position paper will focus on the difference between patient teaching and patient education in formal/structured and informal/unstructured interventions (i.e., during clinical practice). In both teaching and educational activities, it is crucial to adopt a caring approach focused on patient’s needs and different degrees of autonomy that can be promoted. We believe caring should sustain and develop individuals’ living possibilities, even when sick and disabled. This support to patients’ “flourishing” is related to the sustenance in the identity transformation many people must go through when receiving a chronic illness diagnosis. For this reason, we believe that patients’ teaching is not enough to take care of them. A genuinely educational approach is needed to support chronic patients in transforming their identity, which is often required by the onset of the disease. In other words, an approach that is attentive to the relationship, that develops over the long term, and addresses the disease in its various aspects; an approach based on a multi-professional team that enhances the role of expert patients and patients’ associations. In Western health systems, one of the most critical challenges in the years to come will be to take care of patient education and learning to network with communities, in which many caring resources can be found to develop sustainable, effective, inclusive, and community-based patient education activities