Personalised care for long-term conditions

 Living with multiple conditions

Mary, aged 76, has diabetes, arthritis, and macular degeneration, and she’s feeling low. She recently lost her husband, Frank, who died after a long period of dementia. She cared for him devotedly for many years, but this occupied most of her time and energy and took a heavy toll on her health and wellbeing.

Mary’s GP reminds her to attend the local diabetes clinic. The specialist nurses are concerned about her test results and urge her to try to eat a healthier diet and take more exercise. Mary nods, but in her heart knows that this advice will be difficult to follow. Her knees are painful, her eyesight is deteriorating, the local shops don’t sell much in the way of healthy food, and she doesn’t feel confident to travel far on her own.

As populations age, increasing numbers of people live with ...

ARIA 2019: An Integrated Care Pathway for Allergic Rhinitis in Portugal

The Allergic Rhinitis and Its Impact on Asthma (ARIA) initiative started more than 20 years ago and has developed and disseminated evidence-based guidelines and projects in the field of allergic rhinitis. This initiative is currently focused on providing patient-centred guidelines that contribute to an integrated care pathway between the various levels of care and take advantage of digital solutions, and the introduction of integrated care pathways in clinical practice has been recommended. In this article we describe the adaptation for Portugal of the ARIA Integrated Care Pathways document. After a brief review of the epidemiology and impact of allergic rhinitis in Portugal and the activities carried out in Portugal within the ARIA initiative, we describe the broad knowledge base used for the development of recommendations for the pharmacological treatment of allergic rhinitis, and these recommendations are based on the GRADE methodology, real world evidence acquired by mobile technology (mHealth) and ...