[Therapeutic patient education practices in Ivory Cost: investigation among health professionals]

Patient education is an important component in the management and monitoring of chronic diseases. It plays an important role in the decline of the disease severity, mortality and socioeconomic burden and the complications of these chronic diseases. In Côte d’Ivoire, there are few studies to evaluate the reality of this activity.

To explore the practice of patient education in Ivory Coast.

This qualitative study has been carried out by means of semi-structured interviews with 24 healthcare professionals including 14 health managers for individual interviews and 10 care providers for focus group discussion.

There are various representations of therapeutic patient education among health professionals. There was no real distinction between patient education and the broader concept of health education. Absence of national patient education policy, the lack of training in TPE and lack of experience of educational practice lead health professionals to realize an unstructured educational activity.

These results show the need for Côte d’Ivoire to have a national policy of patient education to educate patients in accordance with international recommendations.