Customer Participation In The Healthcare System

Customer participation in healthcare system is an interesting trends emerging in various part of words, that traditionally the health sector has seen consumers as passive recipients of health care. Implementing consumer participation is therefore an ongoing change process, requiring a cultural shift towards recognizing the consumer as an actively engaged healthcare participant (Vago, 2012). In many countries, there are strong social and political reasons why governments and health professionals are responding to consumers' requests to be more involved in the wide range of decisions that need to be made about their health care, from individual through to system-wide levels. Many health care consumers, in fact, consider it to be their right that they are included in various decision-making processes and that they are provided with

In the general health context, consumer participation models typically incorporate varying degrees of involvement in service planning and delivery, ranging from the sharing of information and opinions about services to engaging in shared problem-solving and joint decision-making(Australia, 2011).
Customer participation has been conceptualized comprehensively in the view of the emerging trends that multiple concepts in contemporary healthcare management build on actively involving patients: Patient-centered care, patient empowerment, shared decision-making and self-management. These concepts have different origins, but are related and overlap (Engström, Jon 2014).and others for example; Consumer-Directed Health care, Consumer-Driven Health Plan (CDHP), Patient-Centered Care, and Consumer E-health.
Consumer participation occurs at all levels of the health system (Vago,