Background
The rising incidence and prevalence of chronic conditions – especially cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic respiratory illness, and diabetes – pose a threat to the long-term sustainability of health care delivery systems worldwide [
1,
2]. In many countries, the direct medical costs of managing chronic disease, and in particular multimorbidity, already take up a disproportionate share of the national health care budget [
3‐
5]. Conversely, the quality of services provided to patients has remained largely sub-optimal, with consequences for disease control and patient experience [
6,
7].
In response, a wide range of innovative care concepts has been developed and implemented in many OECD countries [
8,
9]. One influential framework to conceptualize chronic care has been the Chronic Care Model (CCM) [
10,
11]. Conceived as an ‘evidence-based guide to comprehensive health care system redesign’ [
12], it proposes six components to be core to providing high-quality, patient-centered chronic care: community resources and policies; the health care system; self-management support; decision support; delivery system design; and clinical information systems [
10].
While the CCM recognizes the importance of interrelated change in multiple areas of care to better meet the needs of the chronically ill, self-management support has been identified as a key component of the framework [
13]. Chronic illness confronts patients with a spectrum of needs that requires them to alter their behavior and engage in activities that promote physical and psychological well-being, which often have a more direct impact on disease control than the actions of health care professionals [
14,
15]. Evidence across multiple conditions suggests that effective self-management support can improve persons’ self-efficacy, i.e. their belief in their own ability to accomplish specific goals [
16], and health-related behaviors, which, in turn, may impact their health and/or functional status [
17‐
21]. Yet, in practice, approaches to self-management support appear to be the least implemented and most challenging area of chronic care management [
22]. This is in part because self-management support will have to be targeted to meet individual needs, with consequent demands on providers’ time and resources in practice. Moreover, to help patients improve their self-efficacy requires communication skills and psychological counseling techniques which have not traditionally been part of most medical professionals’ training [
23,
24].
In this study, we review whether and how self-management support is integrated with existing approaches to chronic care management in 13 European countries, and the extent to which these approaches provide patients with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to effectively manage their condition. Nested within this review, we examine one country, the Netherlands, in more detail, assessing the level of and barriers to implementation of self-management support in current health care practice from the perspective of care professionals.
Defining self-management support
Self-care and self-management are two distinct concepts that are often used interchangeably [
25]. While self-care has been defined by the WHO as ‘the activities individuals, families, and communities undertake with the intention of enhancing health, preventing disease, limiting illness, and restoring health’ [
26], self-management tends to refer to the active participation of patients in their treatment. [
27] According to Corbin and Strauss [
28], self-management concentrates on three distinct sets of activities: (1) medical management, which refers to tasks such as taking medication and adhering to dietary advice; (2) behavioral management, that is, learning new meaningful roles in the context of a specific condition; and (3) emotional management, which refers to dealing with the feelings of frustration, fright, and despair that are often experienced by chronically ill individuals. Self-management support is generally understood to target all three sets of tasks set out by the Corbin and Strauss framework. The CCM proposes that ‘by using a collaborative approach, providers and patients work together to identify problems, set priorities, establish goals, create treatment plans and solve issues along the way’ [
29]. To facilitate patients to play such an active role in their care, patient education is usually a key part of self-management support [
30]. Standardised interventions to support patients’ self-management furthermore may combine services available within health care (e.g. dietary advice, collaborative care planning) with services in the broader community (e.g. exercise programmes, peer support) [
10,
31].
Discussion
In this paper, we reviewed self-management support approaches for patients with chronic conditions in 13 European countries. We find that, in general, self-management support remains relatively underdeveloped in Europe, though some countries appear further than others in implementing the key support components distinguished by the CCM, i.e. patient education, collaborative care planning, provision of self-management tools, and structured follow-up. This difference might be explained, in part, by facilitative factors in countries’ health system context, such as the financing context which might incentivise self-management support efforts, and/or to what can broadly be viewed as medical culture, including length of consultation [
41], nature of doctor-patient communication [
42], or interdisciplinary teamwork [
43]. At the same time, although there are differences in the ‘what, how, who and where’ of support activities across countries, there are considerable similarities as well. Important commonalities were: (1) the role of nurses as main support givers, which research has shown to lead to better outcomes for the chronically ill [
44‐
46]; and (2) the setting of support activities in primary care, which is widely regarded as most suitable to serve as ‘medical home’ for chronically ill patients [
47]. Moreover, respondents from most countries reported on the presence of collaborative care planning and structured follow-up of patients’ self-management over time, as suggested by the CCM, although it is often unclear how (well) these activities are implemented in practice. Findings from recent international surveys of patients’ experiences with chronic care suggest that there are still substantial shortfalls in the actual level of patient engagement in terms of patient-provider communication, shared-decision making, and follow-up and support between visits [
7,
48].
The self-management support approaches reviewed here differ primarily in terms of mode, format, and materials. Across and within countries, patients are offered a wide variety of educational resources and services, ranging from written materials only to different combinations of individual and/or group-based education sessions, interactive websites, telephone services, and/or peer support. According to a systematic review by Barlow et al. (2002), diversity in self-management interventions is advisable because ‘no approach will meet the needs of all participants at all points in time’ [
49]. With regard to content, support efforts in the 13 countries tend to focus primarily on the first two sets of activities distinguished in the Corbin and Strauss framework [
28], namely medical and behavioral management, but less so on helping patients deal with the emotional consequences of chronic illness. Active involvement of patient associations in chronic care provision, which is the case in some countries, might be an important step towards better support for patients’ emotional management. The six-month evaluation of the Expert Patient Programme in England showed that lay-led education efforts can result in improvements in patients’ partnerships with doctors, their self-efficacy, self-reported energy levels, health-related quality of life, and psychological wellbeing [
50]. In Austria, the added benefit of peer-support in the Therapy Aktiv programme is currently being evaluated [
51].
The interviews with health care professionals in the Netherlands suggested that, despite the emphasis on the role of patients in recent chronic care policymaking, the actual degree of self-management support in practice remains limited, an observation also reported for other countries [
7,
8,
48]. Care providers seem to recognize that engaging patients as partners in their care is key to achieving better health outcomes, yet experience difficulties in operationalizing this phenomenon in their daily working routines. Based on the barriers to patient participation perceived by our respondents, improvements seem necessary in existing IT arrangements and financial incentives to support the use of individual treatment plans. Moreover, it will be important to create a tighter connection between the field of health promotion and the health care system, for instance by including smoking cessation interventions as part of disease management programmes [
31]. Broad implementation of self-management support and of a collaborative approach to chronic care more broadly will require a paradigm shift among health care professionals, who have traditionally been trained to take control of and responsibility for patients’ acute health problems [
52]. Studies in the area of shared decision-making suggest that adoption of the so-called ‘empowerment paradigm’ – which acknowledges that chronically ill patients provide most of their care themselves – will require time and effort, and a supportive health system context in terms of medical education, care processes, quality measurement, and provider reimbursement [
53]. There is a need for further research into barriers and facilitators to implementation to strengthen the dissemination and, with that, the impact of effective self-management support approaches for chronically ill patients within the financial and time-related constraints of daily health care practice.
An important strength of this study is the relatively large number of countries reviewed, which allowed us to provide a broad overview of approaches to self-management support in Europe. Adding an in-depth analysis of support activities in the Netherlands provided more insight into the actual implementation in practice. A limitation of our study is that, despite the use of a data template and the operationalisation of self-management support, country-specific descriptions of support approaches differed in their level of detail and thus some approaches might be relatively underrepresented in this paper. The most important weakness of the research, however, is that we were unable to include the patient perspective, as it was not possible to survey a sufficiently large sample of patients in each country within the time frame of our study. It is likely that patients’ perceptions of the (degree of) self-management support they receive will differ from that of researchers, policymakers/advisors, and health professionals. Existing work has highlighted how, from a patient’s perspective, support for self-management for those with chronic disease in Europe and elsewhere remains underdeveloped, with a 2011 survey of people with chronic conditions in 11 countries finding 20 to 60 percent to report that health care professionals do not help them make treatment plans they can carry out in daily life [
54]. Moreover, 25 to 50 percent felt that their doctor did not spend sufficient time with them or explained things in a way that patients would find easy to understand. Combined with our own findings, these findings further stress the importance of future research in the area of self-management support.
Conclusion
The findings from our 13-country study of self-management support approaches suggest that while Europe might increasingly be talking the talk of patient participation in chronic care, it appears to be far from walking the walk. Support activities are relatively underdeveloped and remain quite traditional, that is, focusing on medical and behavioral skills, with limited attention for the emotional consequences of illness. Reported barriers to implementation of self-management support include insufficient IT and counteractive financial incentives, but also a lack of (proactive policy to stimulate) adoption of the ‘empowerment paradigm’ in health care practice. There is a need for better understanding of how we can encourage both patients and health care providers to engage in productive interactions in daily chronic care practice, which can improve health and social outcomes. Involving patients as ‘experts’ and ‘peer supporters’ might be an important step towards improving emotional management support in chronic care. Future research should investigate to what extent barriers related to health system context and/or medical culture are hampering the implementation of effective self-management support theories in practice.
Ethical approval
Ethical approval was not required for this research in any of the countries described, as respondents participating in the expert data template and provider interviews were approached in their professional function only and no sensitive personal information was collected. Confidentiality with respect to the interview data collected in the Netherlands was maintained by quoting participants without reference to their age, sex and role with regard to the study, i.e. data were anonymised.
Acknowledgments
This study was conducted with support from the DISMEVAL consortium. It draws on additional information from DISMEVAL partners and key informants who contributed information on approaches to chronic disease management in selected countries: Fadila Farsi, Hélène Labrosse (DISMEVAL partner, Centre Anticancereux Leon Berard: cancer networks France), Taavi Lai (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania); Péter Gaál and Márton Csere (Hungary); Walter Ricciardi, Antonio G. De Belvis, Maria Lucia Specchia, TD Luca Valerio (Italy); Liubove Murauskiene, Marija Veniute (Lithuania); and Isabelle Peytremann-Bridevaux, Bernard Burnand and Ignazio Cassis (Switzerland); and was undertaken in cooperation with nine Dutch primary care groups: Regionale Huisartsenzorg Maastricht/Heuvelland, Diabetes Zorgsysteem West-Friesland, Groninger Huisartsen Coöperatie, Huisartsenzorg Drenthe Medische Eerstelijns Ketenzorg, Eerstelijns Centrum Tiel, Coöperatie Zorgcirkels Woerden, Zorggroep Zwolle, Huisartsenketenzorg Arnhem, Cohesie Cure & Care. The DISMEVAL-project was funded under the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) (grant no. 223277). See
http://www.dismeval.eu for additional information.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Authors’ contributions
AE participated in data acquisition, analysis and interpretation, and drafted the manuscript. EN, CK and AC were involved in the design and coordination of the study, data acquisition, analysis and interpretation, and helped to critically revise the manuscript. MB, KC, IDZ, AE, MF, AF, BF, RJ, ZSP, ASS, AS and BV participated in data acquisition, analysis and interpretation, and helped to critically revise the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.