Social Support And Active Adaptation Of Chronic Illness Patients

This paper is an empirical study of chronic patients from the perspective of social support theory (take the renal transplant patients as examples). It contains five chapters: 1) Preface, it introduces the background and meaning of the case study, reviews the related literature, and then generalizes the method of the research; 2) Informal Social Support and Active Adaptation, analyzing the effects of core family, relatives, special friends and doctors; 3) Formal Social Support and Active Adaptation, introducing the function of institutions and hospitalization insurance; 4) Analyzing the other actors those affect the patients' adaptation; 5) Conclusions and Discussion.In my opinion, social support is a general and explanatory concept in analyzing for critical patients. In this paper, the author tries to explain the profound things in two aspects: informal social support and formal social support. In detail, this paper defines informal social support as the integration of instrumental support and emotional support from our patients' family, neighbors, friends, colleagues, etc. This definition stresses that the key to informal social support is the subjective feelings and needs of our patients. Also this paper defines formal social support as the welfare and services provided by the government or the institutions of social welfare. According to this definition, formal social support is an institutional factor. During the investigation, the author finds that formal social support as an institutional factor have direct and deep influence on the patients' active adaptation, and informal social support play a less important but necessary role in the patients' active adaptation. Besides, the two factors cannot cover all connotation of social support. Therefore, the author also analyzes the other factors those affect the adaptation of the patients. Furthermore, the paper brings forward some suggestions to implement an effective social support system.In this paper, the author tries to study the active adaptation of out patients from the perspective of social support, in this sense, it is somewhat an initiative study. Of course, the main factors for explaining the patients' adaptation are economical ones, but the factors that influence the patients' adaptation are multiple, and many non-economical do play a very important role. Social support as an approach will help people pay more attention to social factors besides economical factors, and take more care of the special group.