Patient Advocacy
You may question, "What exactly is patient advocacy?"-hopefully, this will help you better understand.
Patient advocacy is an area of lay specialization in health care concerned with patient education about the use of health plans and how to obtain needed care. Patient advocates include government consumer advocacy agencies, which provide services to the public at large, and private sector for-profit and non-profit service providers, which offer services to individual patients. In the United States, most states have established within their government structures an office of patient advocacy or similar function.
More broadly, patient advocacy can include groups that develop policies and legislation to improve systems or processes for patients, such as the Alzheimer's Association, the British Diabetic Association, and the American Cancer Society. Such patient advocacy organizations are characteristically non-profit and focus on one aspect of health care or a specific disease, generally also conducting fundraising and awareness campaigns and producing healthcare literature and information services. These organizations normally do not engage in the provision of clinical support or the conduct of liaison between patient and provider.
The patient advocate may be an individual or an organization. The terms patient advocate and patient advocacy can refer both to individual advocates providing services that organizations also provide, and to organizations whose functions extend to individual patients. There are also governmental agencies that study and ensure compliance with government regulations including financial aid. Some patient advocates work for the institutions that are directly responsible for the patient’s care.
An individual patient advocate typically acts as liaison between a patient and their health care provider. By professional background, individual patient advocates have often been case managers in the field of social work whose specialty is navigating the bureaucracy of large health plans or government-provided services, or former doctors, nurses or other trained health care professionals who have re-focused on helping patients in their decision-making. Patient advocacy services can also include transition assistance to older patients moving into assisted living and nursing homes, or such mundane but essential tasks as transportation, bill tracking, and payment assistance. There is currently no accredited certification or licensing for patient advocacy in the United States, the United Kingdom, or thus far in any other country. Many colleges and universities offer educational opportunities for students wishing to provide patient advocacy services.[1] These range from weekend workshops, to online webinars, to year-long certificate programs. Patient advocates are individually responsible for self education concerning the general business of medicine, HMO rules, and local institutional changes to compliance articulation and implementation, as well as following relevant legislative changes.