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Procovery and Advocacy
Advocacy is a part of procovery and the process of
moving forward. It means that you will not sit on failure, rather figure out a
way of turning around your oppression and move toward empowerment.
—Molly Cisco, Director, Grassroots Empowerment Project, Wisconsin
Knowing your rights can be more of a burden than a gift
if you lack the self-confidence, communications skills and sense of
self-efficacy to exercise them.
—Kathleen Crowley
Power concedes nothing without a demand.
—Frederick Douglas
You are incredibly vulnerable as a patient, and it can be terrifying to challenge the professionals who have your medical care in their hands. “Thus,” notes George Anas, Professor of Health Law at the Boston University School of Medicine, “sick and injured citizens often voluntarily relinquish rights they would otherwise vigorously assert in the hope that this will aid their recovery.”
Because of this, an essential component of patients’ rights teaching must be inspiring and teaching individuals the effective role of self-advocacy in their healing. This is what Procovery involves. If patients’ rights programs embody procovery-oriented principles and strategies, these programs can re-energize the role of the individual in his or her own treatment, and re-focus services on healing in a more holistic and economic sense. In this way, patients’ rights are both a torch and a tool for procovery.
More specifically:
1. Procovery at its essence is a model for inspiring and empowering individuals to have the confidence, personal understanding and sense of self-efficacy to take control of their healing. This is the essential first teaching prerequisite of patients’ rights. Until this is achieved, rights are merely words in the dark; after this is achieved rights become tools of healing.
2. A significant element and strategy of procovery directly involves the art of self-advocacy, that is, teaching the concepts and skills of effective communications and partnering with health professionals.
3. Procovery aids the acceptance of individual empowerment by health professionals by teaching them that compliance and choice are mirror images, and teaching specific partnering skills professionals can adopt regardless of time and resource limitations. In fact, partnership is a choice individuals make in every single interaction.
4. Procovery is preventive, by teaching individuals the skills of early self-advocacy and helping them develop the personal radar to anticipate and address concerns before a serious rights violation occurs.
5. There is an underlying systemic assumption that empowering individuals will result in an increase of complaints, grievances, and lawsuits. In fact, studies show that patients tend to sue people they don’t like. Procovery teaches self-advocacy in connection with the building of partnering relationships.
6. Procovery is a valuable way of showing—in fact, PROVING—that when individuals exercise more personal control over their treatment, outcomes are better therapeutically, societally and economically. In this manner, procovery paves the way to access new rights supporting that control, that is, showing that there IS a better alternative.
As our efforts in procovery continue and our work significantly expands, we invite and encourage you to visit www.procovery.com and contribute your questions and ideas and insights to info@procovery.com .