Providing confusion: the need for education not information in chronic care.

Patient information is one aspect of meeting the needs of health service users; it is meant to empower patients and their carers in making informed decisions and managing their health needs. Mary Dixon-Woods described two types of discourse in patient education: the first is more concerned with making patients comply with their doctors orders and the second is about empowering patients and rejecting direction. This article looks at the aims of the two and shows that neither is capable of supporting highly successful best practice within medicine. Instead, a hybrid set of strategic aims are proposed for patient education created by merging the two discourses in the same way that John Dewey merged the child-centred and child-led schools of thought in education. These hybrid strategic aims for patient education are then used to develop requirements for an information system to support patient education, using a mixture of system centric and user centric approaches.