Patient and Consumer Engagement in Health Care and Wellbeing: Challenges and Opportunities for a Participatory Health Approach

Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce a Special Issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health entitled “Patient and Consumer Engagement in Healthcare and Wellbeing: Challenges and Opportunities for a Participatory Health Approach”. For detailed information on this journal, I refer you to https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph.

Over time, the care and health needs of people are changing and becoming increasingly complex, and there is work to do to ensure that services deliver high-quality and evidence-based interventions/actions that meet the health needs and expectations of patients and consumers.

Patient and consumer health engagement is a key element of effective health management and promotion, which helps to ensure that the needs of people are adequately met. Participatory approaches to health that systematically include consumers/patients and other stakeholders are broadly advocated. Patients and consumers have important knowledge and experience that may feed into health and care management programs, research, and policy, contributing to their effectiveness and equity. Equally importantly, patient and consumer engagement have the potential to enhance health literacy, healthy food choices, preventive behavior, adherence to treatment, patient and consumer safety, satisfaction with care, quality of life, and reduced healthcare costs.

Moreover, in health and care management, professionals (practitioners, managers, researchers, policymakers) often struggle to sufficiently engage consumers and patients. Insights into best practices, explaining what works, how it works, how to measure the impact, and in which context, are needed to improve patient and consumer engagement in health promotion and care management. Patient and consumer engagement can be highly valuable at numerous levels, but particular attention should be paid to the process of engaging with patients and related ethical issues. For this reason, the values underlying patient and consumer health engagement need to be explored and further explicated to avoid the risk of oversimplification.

This Special Issue on ‘Patient and Consumer Engagement in Healthcare, and Wellbeing: Challenges and Opportunities for a Participatory Health Approach’ will integrate research from multiple perspectives, disciplines, and methodologies to better understand what constitutes effective and valuable patient and consumer health processes and how best to promote them. This Special Issue will publish research and studies that describe different ways that the engagement of patients and consumers in health processes can be enhanced.

The aim is to give readers valuable insights into what works well for enhancing consumer and patient health and care engagement. The Guest Editors would like to invite original research (both quantitative and qualitative), reviews, theoretical frameworks, methodological reflections, and case studies on the following topics:

• Methodologies and up-to-date methodological frameworks used to enhance patient and consumer health engagement;
• Design of interventions devoted to promoting patient and consumer health engagement;
• The impact (e.g., health literacy, healthy food choices, patient and consumer safety; quality of life; clinical outcomes; cost of care) of patient and consumer health engagement;
• Reflections upon the role of professionals, managers, researchers, and policymakers in promoting patient and consumer health engagement;
• Discussions of practical and ethical challenges related to patient and consumer health engagement.

The settings and situations can be diverse, for example, chronic care management, patient advocacy initiatives, drug development, mental health, welfare and public health programs, medical education, organizational interventions, patient and consumer health education, consumer food involvement; healthy food choices; digital health.

The final date for submission is 31 September 2020. However, we will review submitted manuscripts when they are received and will publish papers online when they are accepted.

Dr. Serena Barello
Prof. Guendalina Graffigna
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.