Organising care for chronic illness

Principles of effective management

Whatever health services may offer, most of the day to day responsibilities for the care of chronic illness fall on patients and their families. Planners and organisers of medical care must therefore recognise that health care will be most effective if it is delivered in collaboration with patients and their families. To enable patients to play an active role in their care, health services must not only provide good medical treatment but also improve patients' knowledge and self management skills. This can be done by supplementing medical care with educational and cognitive behavioural interventions. Chronic disease treatment programmes have tended to underestimate the need for this aspect of care, and, consequently, many treatment programmes have been psychologically naive and, as a result, less effective than they could have been.

Services also need to be not merely reactive to patients' requests but proactive with planned follow up. Finally, to be most efficient, interventions are best organised in a stepped fashion—that is, the more complex and expensive interventions are given only when simpler and cheaper ones have been shown to be inadequate or inappropriate.