Facilitating empowerment in employees with chronic disease: qualitative analysis of the process of change

In the field of healthcare, empowering patients who have a chronic disease is defined as increasing their knowledge and skills, in order to enable them to define their treatment goals and take personal responsibility for their medical treatment. Our goal was to explore the nature of empowerment for employees who have a chronic disease and who experience work-related problems.

We used an explorative qualitative approach to document, from a professional perspective, the experiences of patients who participated in an empowerment training program. The researcher and the three instructors identified several themes which appeared to be important to many participants. These themes were fine-tuned and illustrated using brief case histories.

We identified seven themes and characterized them in terms of employee tasks. These included: (1) developing a realistic understanding of one's abilities, (2) standing up for oneself in a self-confident way, (3) maintaining social relations based on mutual understanding with supervisors and colleagues, (4) collecting and assimilating knowledge of one's options, rights and duties, (5) consulting others and negotiating with regard to work accommodations, (6) planning one's job so as to provide personal satisfaction, and (7) maintaining a social life outside work. Not every employee is faced with all of these tasks, but most have to deal with several.

Empowerment presupposes that employees with a chronic disease can act to solve problems at the workplace. The experiences during a comprehensive empowerment training illustrate that a process of reflection on personal emotions and a cognitive process of exploration and identification of bottlenecks at work may precede these actions. Our primary contribution is the aforementioned list of seven common tasks that many workers have to perform. Disseminating the list can support employees who have a chronic disease and may also be useful for their managers, HRM staff, occupational health and other healthcare workers.