Authors: Jingdan Yang, Ping Zou, Qiongli Zhu, Sun Winnie.
While the contemporary healthcare systems recognize the effectiveness of a collaborative approach to delivering care, client participation has been considered as an essential component to person-centered healthcare. The purpose of this paper is to examine the definitions of client participation, describe the benefits of client participation in community health education, examine the factors that influence client participation, and discuss strategies to promote client participation. Client participation has been found to improve health outcomes, increase client satisfaction, and reduce healthcare-related costs. Factors that may influence participation are socioeconomic status, clients’ perceptions of their roles, and healthcare bias or behaviour. Strategies that promote client participation include establishment of a framework or set of guidelines, proactive outreach to increase provider accountability, use of diverse media to improve knowledge translation, and training healthcare professionals.
View/Download pdf