Article
Empowerment and Participation: A way to health improvement?
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Published: | April 25, 2012 |
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Outline
Poster
Empowerment has its roots in the women’s and civil right movement as well as in the literacy cam- paigns in the 1960s [[1]. Nowadays it is a central element of the European Union health strategies [2]. These strategies should enable the European citizens to use appropriate health-related information leading to self-determined decisions according to Arnstein’s ladder [3]).
At the end of February 2011 a web-based search for “empowerment” was performed in the databases of Web of knowledge, ISI, CINAHL and with Google Scholar. The results revealed the highest output in publications dealing with empowerment between the years 1987 and 1997. During the last decade the peer reviewed number of publications reached a constant level of about 1000 papers a year compared to 50.000 hits in Google scholar.
Theses results demonstrate that empowerment is on one hand an important topic in the scientific and the web-based community, on the other hand the European Empowerment Index [http://www.healthpowerhouse.com/files/EPEI-2009/european-patient-empowerment-2009-report.pdf] ranks Austria on position 10 out of 27, which represents daily experience with patients in the health care providing institutions. It is therefore necessary to develop strategies to transfer the scientific findings into the European citizens’ daily life.
References
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- Freire P. Pädagogik der Unterdrückten. Bildung als Praxis der Freiheit. Hamburg: Reinbek; 1971.
- 2.
- Byrne D. Enabling Good Health for all. A reflection process for new EU Health Strategy. Brussels: European Commision; 2004. Zugänglich unter/available from: http://ec.europa.eu
- 3.
- Arnstein SR. A Ladder of Citizen Participation. JAIP. 1969;35(4):216-224.