News

Research partners set up a new European Research and Innovation Centre on Patient Empowerment and Self-Management: Self-Management Europe.

It is an exploitation initiative of the COMPAR-EU project with the aim of developing the potential of people, professionals, organisations, systems, and communities for creating a society that strengthens empowerment and self-management in people with chronic diseases. Through capacity building, the centre provides knowledge, skills, motivation, and competency to people to act as leaders of self-management and empowerment enhancement in everyday life to improve health and quality of life for all.

Whilst there are various ongoing initiatives in Europe to support self-help and self-management with whom the research centre will work in partnership. However, it addresses the critical gap of accelerating the translation of critical research findings in practical applications to benefit patients, organisational and clinical processes and health innovations.

The newly formed initiative recently published a press release which you can read here.

We are happy to announce that Sonicon, a company focused on providing reliable software solutions, will support the development of our European self-management platform hosting different decision aids and further key results resulting from our project.

We are ready to start our joint collaboration on this healthcare innovation!

Our protocol paper is now published at BMJ. You would like to know how patients are included in the project and how our analyses, the Network Meta-analysis, the cost-effectiveness analysis, and the contextual analysis, look like? Read our protocol paper online at BMI.

This year´s face-to-face Cochrane Colloquium was cancelled due to unprecedented situation of civil unrest across Santiago. However, the event was held online from 2-6 December 2019. Virtual CochraneSantiago highlighted the theme of ‘Embracing Diversity’. The Colloquium explored ways in which Cochrane could address the challenge of diversity in many areas: how to inform complex health decisions with diverse types of evidence; how to engage people with low health literacy; how to reach non-English-speaking audiences; how to explore new ways of delivering evidence from reviews (e.g., podcasts, videos); and how to incorporate diverse types of evidence in reviews (qualitative evidence, mixed methods evidence, etc.).

Our five poster presentations are still available online:

• The perspective of patients living with chronic heart failure on self-management interventions: A mixed-method overview for the COMPAR-EU project
• The perspective of patients living with obesity on self-management interventions: A mixed-method overview for the COMPAR-EU project
• The perspective of patients living with type 2 diabetes mellitus on self-management interventions: A mixed-method overview for the COMPAR-EU project
• What do patients and their caregivers value on self-management interventions for chronic conditions? A scoping review of systematic reviews for the COMPAR-EU project
• Incorporating patients´preferences in the development of core outcome sets for four chronic conditions: COMPAR-EU project

The first ever European Congress on patient involvement provided an exceptional opportunity for dialogue and engagement with a wide range of health players who aspire to make patient involvement a reality. At the event on 12 – 14 November in Brussels, it was explored why patient involvement leads to better outcomes for patients and society, and how patient involvement can be achieved in practice across Europe.

We interviewed a patient who highlighted that there are three key elements of successful patient self-management:

• The patient knows what is expected
• The patient agrees with what is expected
• The patient must be able to follow the plan. Both, in actions and financiall

The event offered the great opportunity to discuss our approach on patient involvement in COMPAR-EU.

Fun fact: The stairs of the venue attract to use them: They were marked with the number of calories you will lose while climbing the stairs.

This year´s theme of the conference that was organised by the Guidelines International Network in partnership with the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) was “Trustworthy Evidence For Questions That Matter – The value of guidelines in 21st century healthcare”. It was an interesting event relevant to all healthcare professionals and anyone with an interest in addressing evidence-practice gaps by promoting best practice and improving the quality and safety of health care.

Our partner IR-HSCSP presented two posters:

• How to compare the (cost-)effectiveness of self-management interventions: using network meta-analysis to include both direct and indirect assessments of multiple treatment options
• Development and external validation of a comprehensive Taxonomy of self-management interventions in chronic onditions: the COMPAR-EU taxonomy.

The 36th International Conference of ISQua, the International Society for Quality in Health Care, took place from 20-23 October 2019 in Cape Town, South Africa. This year’s theme was “Innovate, Implement, Improve: Beating the Drum for Safety, Quality and Equity.”

Our partner FAD had two oral presentations!

• Advancing patient-centred care: development and external validation of comprehensive taxonomy of self-management interventions in chronic conditions

• Are we researching in the areas that matter for patients? Developing core outcome sets for self-management interventions in chronic disease

Great effort by the whole consortium to disseminate the work carried out!

There is always good collaboration and exchange between all COMPAR-EU partners at different stages. In addition to work package-specific meetings in which involved partners participate, all consortium partners meet once a year. This year, our second consortium meeting took place on 30th of September and 1st of October 2019 in Ioannina, Greece. UOI hosted this event. The two full working days with discussions on the status of the project development were very fruitful. The extraction process for the first disease (Diabetes Mellitus Type 2) has been largely completed and network meta-analyses of the effectiveness of self-management interventions can begin. We are also starting to develop our final product, the COMPAR-EU platform featuring decision aids. Consortium meetings are very crucial as they foster interactive group discussion and drive our work forward.