The healthtalk.org “Living with multiple health problems” section presents patients’ experiences of coping with the complexities of multiple illnesses. Users of the website are able to access more than 200 extracts in video, audio or written format from interviews with real patients discussing various aspects of living with multimorbidity as well as advice on self-management of treatments and juggling all the required medication across multiple conditions.
The main challenges facing patients with multiple conditions are managing sometimes conflicting treatments, deciding what to prioritise, coordinating the care received from different professionals and generally overcoming sometimes poor communication from those professionals.
Communication is the key to managing multimorbidity, according to Dr Gavin Daker-White, Research Fellow at The University of Manchester’s School of Health Sciences, who led the analysis of the interviews for the web resource.
The study was co-funded by the School and the Greater Manchester Primary Care Patient Safety Translational Research Centre.
Press release by University of Manchester 'NICE guidelines on treating multiple health conditions in a single patient supported by a unique online self-management resource'.