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This study examines patient empowerment in two local diabetes branch organisations in Sweden. In particular, the study focuses on the organisations’ membership, participation and influence on external actors. The overall aim of this thesis is to explore patient empowerment in order to discern what influence patient organisations and individual members can have and how they use it. This study is based on both quantitative and qualitative empirical data. Interviews with active members from two local diabetes organisations were conducted and a survey was carried out to identify the members’ thoughts and feelings about their membership, motivations, participation and influence, as well as to examine their local organisation, its work and influence. The findings form an overall picture of how members experience their organisation, memberships and empowerment. Characteristics of the two local patient branch organisations were identified and the leaders were found to be intensely dedicated people. The interviews, survey and participant observations revealed the members’ opinions about their organisation, their reasons for joining, their involvement, participation and influence, as well as their understanding of the local organisation and the Swedish Diabetic Association (SDA) and their possibility to empower them. Without organisations, members felt that they could not have a significant influence on external actors and events.

The diploma thesis focuses on impact of civic engagement on health care system. It studies to what level this participation helps health care system transformation and change of a relationship between patients and political and professional authorities. It's aim is to provide a critical sociological analysis and explain social processes accompanying patients' engagement by using examples. Patient organisations - an institutionalised form of civic society with a potential to evoke social change - get into scope here. The ambition of this thesis is to show the applicability of the reflexivity concept to the area of health care, to enrich this analytical framework by multilevel approach to the health care system and therefore add to the discourse around civic engagement phenomenon by a systemic and structured view of dynamic relationships between patient organisations and health care system. The findings of the author are based on an analysis of semi-structured interviews with patient organisations representatives and available documents. The author emphasises the ambivalent impact of civic engagement which on one side reinforces individual transformations of micro, meso, macro and meta levels of health care system and also acts as a catalyst of wider sociocultural changes. On the other hand, it is accompanied...