Unfortunately, dealing with one chronic disease doesn't mean that you can't develop another. More than 50 million people in Europe are living with more than one such condition, and this number is expected to grow. EU-funded researchers are looking into ways to provide them with more integrated support and redesign healthcare systems accordingly.
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On the whole, patients with a combination of chronic conditions — diabetes and high blood pressure, for example — report poorer quality of life than people with a single illness, and their health status is worse. The added risk to their life and wellbeing derives not just from the diseases themselves, but also from the fact that they are combined. One reason is that people with such so-called co-morbidities or multi-morbidities can struggle to obtain coherent care.
Possible problems include a lack of collaboration among their doctors, conflicting advice and potentially interfering treatments, with compliance suffering as a result. The cost of care can also be an obstacle, as can the sheer complexity of keeping up with multiple consultations and appointments, which can be a time-consuming logistical challenge.
Difficulties such as these can limit the effectiveness of otherwise excellent treatment. They arise, in part, from the fact that healthcare systems are not traditionally designed with such cases in mind.
An EU-funded project named Selfie has set out to tackle the issue. “Multi-morbidity will become the number one threat to population health and economic sustainability of health care systems,” the researchers note.
The team is therefore identifying ways to provide more patient-centred and integrated care, and to back these approaches with adequate payment systems. Launched in September 2015, Selfie will engage with a wide range of stakeholders over a period of four years to deliver guidance, tools and strategies for healthcare authorities and policy-makers.