What contextual features affect the outcome and sustainability of therapeutic patient education interventions?

Therapeutic patient education interventions are influenced by contextual factors. Therefore, describing the context is crucial to understanding how it can affect therapeutic patient education interventions and contribute to outcomes. We aimed to identify the contextual features that may affect the outcome and sustainability of therapeutic patient education interventions from a healthcare professional perspective.

Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with healthcare professionals involved in 14 therapeutic patient education interventions covering different chronic conditions (e.g., kidney and cardiovascular diseases, chronic pain, diabetes, obesity). Interviews were recorded and fully transcribed. We followed a general inductive approach to identify themes from healthcare professionals' discourse to properly capture their perception.

Saturation was achieved with 28 interviews with 20 nurses, 6 dieticians, one physiotherapist and one psychologist. The average therapeutic patient education experience was 7 years. Identified contextual features clustered in 5 main themes: 1) conditions for the development of the intervention (genesis of the program: Who and what prompted it?; supports; content development; legislative framework); 2) integration of the program (in the healthcare pathway or the environment, relationship with the institution or local environment); 3) teamwork cohesion, interaction and integration with the environment (exchanges, cohesion of the team); 4) sustainability of the program; and 5) patient and healthcare professional contextual factors.

New insights into contextual features that may be involved in therapeutic patient education interventions are represented in a framework based on the Medical Research Council evaluation framework. These features need to be addressed in studies of therapeutic patient education interventions and could help healthcare professionals build more effective interventions within the context. However, describing a list of elements of the context is not enough; analyses should also focus on how the contextual elements might affect an intervention and how they interact.