Introduction
Lymphoedema is a chronic disease which requires a lymphological rehabilitative team which, after the evaluation of the functioning of the person, decides the overall care of the patient with the opening of the rehabilitative project, containing the personalized rehabilitative plan as well as the therapeutic education, not before having verified the patient's and any caregiver's awareness of own illness.
Aims of study
Considering that lymphoedema is a chronic disease, the rehabilitative program is designed to achieve not only short-medium term results, due to therapeutic strategy, but above all the long term one through the therapeutic education which includes making the patient and any caregiver aware of disease and the therapeutic path.
Methods
The first step to achieving awareness of the disease and the therapeutic path, is always to achieve the patient and any caregiver’s adherence through optimal communication from the team that has to respect their characteristics and the personal latency time; this ability cannot ignore the rehabilitation team of skills such as the use of simple language, the empathy and to the ability to listen-understand the patient's discomfort. The second step is to make sure the patient has understood self-management strategies, sometimes with the help of the caregiver, through the information about the hygienic-behavioural rules, teaching of the combined self-management (simplified manual drainage-bandage-gymnastics) and the compression garment management.
Results
The team, whose goal has always been the improvement of patients’quality of life, by seeking a psycho-physical balance, has to be able to verify the awareness and acceptance of the chronicity of their disease in patients to whom self-care was taught. Furthermore, these patients forwarded fewer requests for repetitive and useless treatment over a short period of time and in the meantime the results obtained with intensive treatment remained more stable until the following check-up.
Conclusions
Lymphological rehabilitative team’s challenge is to get patient's adherence to the therapeutic educational strategy designed in order to induce increased patient awareness of their limits and possibilities for an optimal self-management, in order to control of their chronic disease and to avoid or at least limit the clinical worsening. Furthermore, through therapeutic education, patients also need to be less dependent on the rehabilitation team, which remains however their point of reference and intervenes in the intensive treatment when necessary. Although teaching and learning things that one cannot fully accept in oneself is always a difficult task, it is not impossible.