Patient Enablement in Osteoarthritis - a Longitudinal Study on Patient Education Programs in Primary Health Care

The overall purpose is to study quality in patient education by means of the patients' self-rated enablement. Specific aims are:

To assess the validity of the patient enablement instrument in relation to self-efficacy and empowerment; To investigate if patient enablement can be effective in identifying which patients would benefit the most from patient education; To study if patient enablement has any relation to self-efficacy, function or self-rated health; To analyze if patient enablement has a causal effect on health care consumption; To evaluate whether patient education is a cost-effective intervention. The project is a longitudinal study, including patients from a patient education programme for osteoarthritis in primary health care. Data consist of patient reported outcome measures and health care consumption. Cost-effectiveness and cost-utility analysis will be used. Inclusion of patients will start August 2016. Analyses of data and manuscript writing will be performed in 2018-2019. Researchers included are from primary health care settings and researchers in the field of OA, patient education and health economy. Our increasingly older and more inactive population will raise huge demands on the health care. The importance of optimizing treatments that are available in primary health care cannot be underestimated. The project will contribute with important knowledge about the patient's own process of getting well.