Exploring and quantifying preferences towards self-management support interventions for individuals with long term health conditions

Around 70% of the total health and care spend in England is attributed to caring for people with long term conditions. The management of these people is an area where more person-centred provision may yield substantial financial and non-financial benefits to patients, their families and the NHS. A recent evidence review found that supporting self-management can have a positive impact on people’s clinical symptoms, attitudes, quality of life and patterns of healthcare resource use. Despite there being a wide range of interventions designed to encourage and support self-management, current knowledge and evidence about the best strategies to support behaviour change is, at this point, limited.

This research aims to generate evidence that can be used to inform effective provision of person-centred self-management support, by addressing the research question: what is the value that people with long term health conditions place on self-management support interventions?

The research question will be answered through a mixed method approach, that has a discrete choice experiment at its heart. The researchers will:

• taxonomise self-management support strategies based on their key generalisable characteristics
• identify which characteristics (e.g. processes and outcomes) matter to patients
• quantify the value patients place on these characteristics
• assess the trade-offs patients are prepared to make between the characteristics of competing self-management support interventions.

Contact details

For more information about this project, please contact Darshan Patel, Research Manager at the Health Foundations and Professor Andrea Manca, the University of York.