Integrating palliative care into primary care for patients with chronic, life-limiting conditions.

As longevity increases, individuals with chronic, life-limiting conditions will live longer with disease burden and functional decline. Nurse practitioners can integrate symptom management, early decision-making, and supportive care into the primary care setting to improve quality of life and decrease economic and emotional impact at the end of life.

Supporting self-management: A guide to enabling behaviour change for health and wellbeing using person- and community-centred approaches

This guide outlines how the science of behaviour can help people to self-manage their health and wellbeing.

Key findings

• The guide uses the EAST framework to organise ideas and examples. The core message of EAST is that if you want to encourage a behaviour, you should make it Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely.
• The guide features a number of low-tech, pragmatic and manageable activities which can increase the spread of person- and community-centred health and wellbeing programmes.

This action-focused guide is part of the NHS England-funded Realising the Value programme, which seeks to develop person- and community-centred approaches for health ...

Spreading change: A guide to enabling the spread of person- and community-centred approaches for health and wellbeing

This guide outlines how behavioural science can help spread the take-up of person- and community-centred approaches to health and wellbeing.

Key findings

•     The guide uses the EAST framework to organise ideas and examples. The core message of EAST is that if you want to encourage a behaviour, you should make it Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely.
•     The guide features a number of low-tech, pragmatic and manageable activities which can increase the spread of person- and community-centred health and wellbeing programmes.

This action-focused guide is part of the NHS England-funded Realising the Value programme, which seeks to develop person- and community-centred ...

Strategies To Empower Communities To Reduce Health Disparities

Community-based participatory research is a promising approach to reducing health disparities. It empowers individuals and communities to become the major players in solving their own health problems. We discuss the use of community-based participatory research and other strategies to enhance empowerment. We also discuss projects from the Centers for Population Health and Health Disparities that have empowered communities to achieve positive health outcomes aimed at reducing disparities. We offer recommendations to policy makers for involving residents in efforts to achieve health equity.

Meeting the Needs of the Growing Very Old Population: Policy Implications for a Global Challenge

Very old adults are one of the fastest-growing age groups worldwide. Yet they rarely constitute a targeted group for public policies. Drawing on the results of the centenarian studies presented in this special issue, we highlight major challenges that arise from the increase of this population. We outline several promising approaches for policy makers and professionals to develop evidence-based policies and programs that are tailored to the needs of very old adults and their families. We focus our discussion on three key topics essential to life care: the importance of integrated care to meet the complex care needs of the ...

Understanding integrated care: a complex process, a fundamental principle

Recent Editorial in the International Journal on Integrated Care, written by Nick Goodwin, emphasising the importance of the Framework. Around the past year Nick Goodwin has been involved in a range of research and development activities that seek to understand and/or promote the successful adoption of integrated care. In each of these, a common opening statement from protagonists is to typically say that “there is no universally accepted definition of integrated care, no one model of care that can be replicated locally, and little evidence to tell us that it works”. Whilst the latter might be disputed it remains ...

Ending Preventable Child Deaths with Integrated Community Case Management: Stronger Pharmaceutical Systems for Healthier Communities

Many child deaths in developing countries are preventable: Children die from treatable conditions, such as pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria, because families in rural, hard-to-reach, or conflict-ridden areas can’t access or afford the treatments. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), launched in September 2015, set ambitious targets of ending preventable child deaths by 2030 and reducing mortality among children under age five to at least 25 per 1,000 live births. Integrated community case management (iCCM) has been recognized as a key strategy for increasing access to essential treatments and meeting the objectives for children under five laid out in the ...

No universal health coverage without primary health care

Correspondance

Universal health coverage is currently the aspiration of many countries worldwide. We commend Michael Reich and colleagues for analysing lessons learned from different country experiences, but we believe there is a crucial element neglected within the ongoing universal health coverage debate.

Health-care system development requires more than financing and human resource considerations. Although essential, these components must be integrated into an overall framework for organising and delivering care that best meets population needs. Primary health care provides such a framework, builds the backbone of an effective health-care system, and can improve health, reduce growth in costs, and lower inequality ...

The World report on ageing and health: a policy framework for healthy ageing

Although populations around the world are rapidly ageing, evidence that increasing longevity is being accompanied by an extended period of good health is scarce. A coherent and focused public health response that spans multiple sectors and stakeholders is urgently needed. To guide this global response, WHO has released the first World report on ageing and health, reviewing current knowledge and gaps and providing a public health framework for action. The report is built around a redefinition of healthy ageing that centres on the notion of functional ability: the combination of the intrinsic capacity of the individual, relevant environmental characteristics, and ...

“Informed choice” in a time of too much medicine—no panacea for ethical difficulties

Providing information to enable informed choices about healthcare sounds immediately appealing to most of us. But Minna Johansson and colleagues argue that preventive medicine and expanding disease definitions have changed the ethical premises of informed choice and our good intentions may inadvertently advance overmedicalisation

The idea of informed patients who make reasoned decisions about their treatment based on personal preferences is appealing in a Western cultural context, with its focus on the autonomous individual. Rightly, many doctors now reject paternalism if the patient does not specifically ask for it. They prefer to elicit the patient’s preferences and embrace an ...