Edited an hour later – I had the wrong French speaking e-patient!
On Facebook today Christine Bienvenu @TinaBurger posted this news on my timeline:
… with the help of a Swiss colleague who works at the Geneva University Hospitals we were able to get the French definition of#epatient onto the French Wikipedia. I was sick of not finding the definition in French and so decided that it was time to fix that. Seeing as I’m in the middle of translating Let Patients Help, I used that as inspiration to create the definition.
At first it was put up for removal as some of the Wikipedia moderators who obviously don’t “get it” declared that it was a buzzword-trend concept and not an actual scientific term. But we were able to argument it’s legitimacy with definitions, references and external links to show just how seriously it is considered in the medical world. I then sollicitated the help of my influencial epatient friends in France and others in the twittosphere to vote for keeping the definition on Wikipedia. And it has just been officially accepted onto Wikipedia!
Congratulations, Christine, and thank you!
To visit the listing click the graphic or here.
<french>
Ma chere Christine,
j’ai eu exactement la meme histoire lorsque j’ai cree la page e-patient de wikiepdia en Anglais. C’eat amusant de voir que l’histoire continue quelques annees plus tard dans un autre pays, avec une culture qui semble avaoir un peu de retard sur l’accepabilite du concept de patient autonome.
</french>
The e-patient page in Wikipedia, created in 2008, still has the following:
“This article’s tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. See Wikipedia’s guide to writing better articles for suggestions. (May 2008)”
Hopefully, some day, they’ll remove that statement.
Like you, Christine, we had fairly heated discussion when I created the page. You can them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:E-patient
Thank you Gilles for your comment, and I apologize for my late response. Yes, it is indeed interesting to see that the resistance reactions are the same. But we will get there, the ehealth/epatient philosophy will get the message out there. Like all change, it takes time. Let’s keep up the good work! :-)