Health Democracy and Storytelling:A Synthesis of KnowledgeOA

Aims:Health democracy requires tools and methodologies to involve non-scientific actors in the development and implementation of health policies.Storytelling could be one of the tools to make health democracy effective.Our aim is to describe how storytelling is used in relation to health democracy,the aims of its use,the methodology adopted and the results obtained.Procedure:We conducted a narrative review of the literature.Our search equation was composed by the keyword“narration”and its variations“récit de vie”,“histoire de vie”and“medécine narrative”and by the keyword“démocratie en santé”/“démocratie sanitaire”.Results:We obtained 135 results and included six articles,published between 2015 and 2022.The interest of storytelling in a health democracy approach concerns six main themes:a)the plurality of experiences;b)empowerment;c)the recognition of different types of knowledge;d)the involvement of all care actors in care;storytelling as a lever for change;e)in the care pathway;f)in health policies.Conclusion:The limited number of articles included in this literature review raises questions about the diffusion of the concept of health democracy associated with that of storytelling.Storytelling can contribute to the dissemination and effectiveness of health democracy:it is a complementary tool to quantitative tools for understanding the experiences of users of the health care system,and its use is particularly relevant to chronic diseases such as cancer.