[Patient involvement: challenges for organized self-help and joint self-government]

The involvement of the patient perspective in decision-making processes in the healthcare system is commonly welcome, especially in Germany, with self-help organizations currently providing the vast majority of patient representatives in the various committees. The central plank of organized self-help is the mutual support of chronically diseased and disabled people as well as their relatives in self-help groups.Patient involvement, however, seems to lead organized self-help to an insoluble dilemma. Either organized self-help must give up their traditional working principles in order to be capable of acting as a professional player in the discourse of the joint self-government of doctors and healthcare funds, or they will simply be unable to cope with patient involvement if they remain true to their original way of mutual exchange and communication. But if organized self-help and joint self-government are considered as social systems, it becomes clear that though patient involvement relates these systems to each other, it does not give rise to a relation of dominance and subordination. Organized self-help may have to handle the requirements and inputs of self-government as well as of the systems of science and law, but also has to be considered a challenge to and an opportunity for the self-government to help them achieve their system-related goals.