Compliance with treatment groups: a teaching and learning arena for healthcare professionals and patients

This article presents a healthcare practice - the Compliance with Treatment Group - that provides a potential treatment, teaching and learning arena for patients and healthcare professionals, a stage for the interaction of different people, concepts, values and cultures, in which each player is at once unique but able to see himself in others, through dynamics that enable talking, listening, feeling, questioning, reflecting and learning to think. Its chief characteristic is being an informative and reflexive support group that is homogeneous where the diseases of the participating patients are concerned, under the coordination of two or more healthcare professionals from different categories, whose objective is to make it easier for patients to comply with treatment through dialogue. The study presents an analysis of the work carried out with groups of patients suffering from chronic illnesses and stresses the use of group practice as a therapeutic setting and an arena where patients and healthcare professionals teach and learn. It emphasizes the pedagogical aspects of this practice by encouraging learning through contact with problem situations. This enables adding political, ethical, economic, affective, social and cultural dimensions to current specific knowledge (the health issue). The article also points out the possibility of using this technique for developing communication and work team practices in the field of healthcare education.