The Patient Engagement Capacity Model: What factors determine a patient’s ability to engage? (13 March 2019)

Summary

The Center for the Advancement of Team Science, Analytics, and Systems Thinking, College of Medicine, Ohio State University, have created a model to conceptualise engagement capacity drawing upon social cognitive theory, developed in the 1960s and 1970s by Canadian psychologist Albert Bandura to explain the various ways that people acquire behaviours. This theoretical framework is widely used specifically to study how people acquire their health habits.

The theory includes the concept of 'reciprocal determinism': the idea that there is a dynamic relationship between the person, their environment, and their behaviours, in which they continually influence each other and are influenced by each other. A focus on capacity and context can help providers and health care organisations identify the dimension(s) of engagement that create the greatest barriers for both individual patients and their patient population as a whole, and allocate their resources accordingly.