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Self Care

Self Care is about the choices people make and the actions people take on their own behalf in the interest of maintaining their health and wellbeing.

For patients, self care means keeping fit and healthy, as well as knowing how to take medicines, treat minor ailments and seek help when they need it. If you have a long-term condition, self care is about understanding that condition and how to live with it.

 

Background

Research shows that supporting self care can improve health outcomes, increase patient satisfaction and help in deploying the biggest collaborative resource available to the NHS and social care - patients and the public. Helping people self care represents an exciting opportunity and challenge for the NHS and social care services to empower patients to take more control over their lives. 

 

 

Benefits of Self Care

There are a number of benefits to health, including:

  • Increase in life expectancy

  • Better control over symptoms

  • Reduction in pain, anxiety and depression levels

  • Improvement in quality of life, with greater independence

  • Reduction in days off work

 

There are also a number of benefits to the NHS, including:

  • Improved quality of consultations

  • Improved medication intake and utilisation 

  • Potential reductions in

    • visits to GPs

    • hospital admissions

    • hospital Length Of Stay

    • outpatient visits

    • A&E visits can reduce significantly

 

 

 

Evidence to Support Self Care

There is a large amount of information to evidence self care.  The Department of Health's publication titled 'Research evidence on the effectiveness of self care support' provides one of the most comprehensive evidence based documents for self care.  This document and it's accompanying summary presentation can be found here.

There is also evidence from the Expert Patients Programme in a document titled 'self care reduces costs and improves health - the evidence', which can be found here.

 

 

Self Care Education for Clinicians

There are a number of self-care education sources available.  We have split them up into the following:

 

Self Care - Generic

In process of updating

 

Self Care - COPD Specific

In process of updating

 

Self Care - Diabetes Specific

In process of updating.

Long term conditions

Other useful links:

NHS Choices
NHS Choices Self Care

Patient focussed site.  A guide to long-term conditions and self care.  Helps patients to find out about the support that's available to help look after themselves if they have a long-term condition.
 

The Health Foundation
Self Management Support Resource Centre

This resource centre is packed full of information and practical resources that can be adopted and adapted locally to help services and health professionals to develop their own self management support programmes.

  

Selfmanagement.co.uk
Resource Centre for the self management community

Self-management resources, news, information and advice about all aspects of self-management of long term health conditions.

 

Self Care Forum
Information & resources on self care

The purpose of the Self Care Forum is to further the reach of self-care and embed it into everyday life.

 

Expert Patients Programme
EPP CIC

Expert Patients Programme Community Interest Company (EPP CIC) provide and deliver free courses aimed at helping people who are living with a long-term health condition to manage their condition better on a daily basis.

 

DAFNE
Dose Adjustment For Normal Eating

DAFNE is a way of managing Type 1 diabetes and provides people with the skills necessary to estimate the carbohydrate in each meal and to inject the right dose of insulin.