The Need for structured patient education in improving treatment outcome in chronic lifelong diseases

Abstract

Incidence of chronic lifestyle related diseases is on the surge not only in Pakistan¹ but globally. Obesity and its associated comorbidities like heart disease, diabetes, stroke and other microvascular complications not only affect the patient’s quality of life but also put a lot of economic burden both on the patient and healthcare sector.

It is recommended to share palatable information to the patients in the pre-contemplation phase, a phase where the individual don’t recognizes that his current lifestyle poses any danger to his life, therefore is not open for any change, here argumentation will be of least help³. By employing the medical journalism and social media platform, it is needed that a simple, easily digestible information about the current disease of the patient, its associated complications along with treatment strategies should be made available to the patient along with the prescription. Since a lot of Latin language is already used on the social media and it hasn’t making any impact on changing the current unhealthy behaviors of the patients suffering from chronic lifelong diseases. So the need of the hour is to formulate a healthy dietary plan in the mother language of the patients and make it available at the time of consultation since it might have better impact on the patient education.