Terapeutic patient education: a new deal for medical education

Nowadays, in developed countries with an aging population, chronic diseases necessitates the largest amount of medical care and their complications represent the main causes of hospitalization and of health costs. Differently from acute conditions, chronic diseases require the patients’ compliance and their active involvement in the management of their daily life. The concepts of patient’s empowerment, of patient-physician partnership and therapeutic alliance, which are more and more frequently discussed in the medical literature, are directily linked to this new attribution of roles and responsabilities within the frame of chronicity. Therapeutic Patient Education (TPE) has been recognized by WHO as a major component of the treatment and long term follow up of many long term diseases. TPE programs are planned, run and evaluated by multiprofessional teams of health care providers, trained in the methodology of patient education. Even if modern medical curricula pay considerable attention to the patient-physician communication and expose the students to some educational methodologies, this might be insufficient to prepare the future physician to teach efficiently the patient and/or to manage a group of patients involved in a TPE program. TPE undoubtely requires new competencies from the physician, which means that the medical student should also be trained in this field during his studies. Medical education and TPE share many common characteristics and TPE would lead to an important epistemological shift in the medical education field if we include the therapeutic patient education as a core element of this discipline. By addressing a larger public, offering new methodologies, opening new research avenues to TPE, medical education would allow open a wider future prospective.