Lay summary
It is increasingly important to develop effective strategies for promoting self-care and self-management by patients and citizens. Governments and healthcare providers seek to develop healthcare systems that guarantee high quality care with a special focus on the ageing population and the increase in chronic diseases. Interventions that enable self-management can provide a solution. COMPAR-EU identifies such interventions and helps patients to find the best solution for their specific condition.
What is COMPAR-EU´s benefits for patients?
COMPAR-EU identifies, compares, and ranks the most efficient and cost-effective self-management interventions (SMIs) including preventive and management ones, for adults with one of the four high-priority chronic conditions: type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), obesity, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and heart failure. The objective of COMPAR-EU is to facilitate shared decision-making in different healthcare contexts. To achieve this, COMPAR-EU project partners offer a library of studies on different SMIs with information about the target groups, methods or interventions used, as well as relevant outcomes of the interventions.
We also incorporated decision aids to help patients understand different preventive and treatment options. Information about each option’s potential benefits and harms help patients determine the interventions that are best fit for them and choose the self-management interventions that consider their personal preferences. These aids are interactive, i.e., users are able to choose from a set of interactive settings the condition (and comorbidities) they are interested in, the key outcomes they want to improve, and contextual or individual factors that might influence the effectiveness of a SMI (gender, geographic area, healthcare system level, etc.).
What are self-management interventions (SMIs)?
Self-management interventions (SMIs) are activities or procedures that aim to improve the way patients self-manage their chronic condition -how they deal with the day-to-day consequences of their condition, and how to reach or maintain an optimal quality of life. The types of SMIs range from the provision of condition-specific information to extensive health programmes. SMIs are important healthcare interventions as they can help to change behaviour and improve health outcomes. They include regular assessment of progress and problems.
The European Patients’ Forum (EPF) contributes to COMPAR-EU, ensuring that the patient perspective is considered in all aspects and stages of the project. Click here to get to know the EPF team. Further information on the tasks that EPF is leading in the project can be found here.
What matters to patients with chronic disaeses when it comes to self-management outcomes?
The project has developed 4 Core Outcome Set (COS) to guide self-management interventions in these diseases and will go on to develop an online decision-making tool for policymakers, researchers, patients, and the healthcare industry.
Read more in our COMPAR-EU lay summary leaflets.
For more detailed information, check out the full lay summaries below.
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