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5 communication strategies for dry eye patients
November 8, 2020 - Katherine M. Mastrota, MS, OD, FAAO, Dipl ABO. For success and efficiency in disease management, OD’s should shift sights from a provider-dependent orientation toward one of patient proactive, preventative, and self-care management in dry eye and other chronic diseases. Active two-way communication is key, along with a shared agenda, openness to ask questions, regular assessments of readiness to change, self-management goals, and corrected misunderstandings of the treatment plan.
The Tear Film and Ocular Surface Society (TFOS) Dry Eye Workshop (DEWS) II report redefines dry eye as a multifactorial disease of the ocular surface. For most patients, dry eye is chronic, progressive, and inflammatory in nature.
Chronic disease is defined on the basis of the biomedical disease classification and includes diabetes, asthma, and depression. Chronic illness is the personal experience of living with the affliction that often accompanies chronic disease.
Importance of communication
As eyecare practitioners, ODs often will cultivate a long-term, personal therapeutic relationship with their dry eye, chronic disease patients. Communication in this relationship is paramount to successful treatment outcomes. Not unlike other disease states, empowering the patient to be engaged in self-care, proactive in medical decision-making, and a contributor to their own healing process potentiates the doctor-patient team effort in disease management.
On the basis of a growing body of evidence of dominant patterns in chronic illness experience from the insider perspective, we now know that communication between chronically ill patients and their healthcare providers has tremendous potential to be instrumental in facilitating coping, self-care management, and an optimal quality of life, or, conversely, in being toxic and damaging to those ideals.
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