What is Planning and Control

The potential role of patients' organizations in healthcare, in order to be effective, needs to be sustained by appropriate knowledge and skills. The chapter has the scope to review the key requirements for the management of such organizations. After a background introduction about added value of patient capacity building, it proposes the ‘antenna skill framework', a visual and practical illustration summarizing the necessary knowledge and skills for patient organizations' management. A generic patient organization is represented as an antenna progressively picking up many kinds of knowledge and skills: about the institutional framework, disease-related, technical, and managerial. Particular attention is devoted to management and administration, proposing a business model canvas tailored to patient organizations. In conclusion, the insightful tools proposed in the chapter can foster policymakers, universities, and other educational operators to conceive suitable training programs to form capable patient managers.