Collaborative Self-Management Support in Chronic Conditions - Qualitative Study

The management of chronic conditions is a challenge for health systems worldwide, particularly in the context of an aging population, and requires urgent improvement of health services. Integrated care and patient empowerment represent promising solutions: offering tailored self-management support in a collaborative framework led to good results in several clinical contexts. Yet, large scale implementation remains a challenge. An important limitation of existing solutions is a lack of utilization of behavioural and communication theory for identifying the dynamics of pluridisciplinary collaboration and the interactive effects of the activities performed by several actors involved in self-management support in a given chronic condition. A second limitation is not involving all relevant actors in the development of health service improvement solutions, which leads to limited programme adoption and sustainability in routine care.

This study is part of a project that proposes to address these limitations and develop and interdisciplinary model of collaborative care in the self-management of chronic conditions (CoSMaS) that adopts a community-based participative approach. CoSMaS-ql is a qualitative study that will consist of semi-structured interviews with several types of stakeholders: patients, caregivers, and health care professionals of different specialties (e.g. general practitioners, nurses, specialist consultants, pharmacists). The main objective of the study is to explore the experiences and of patients, caregivers, and HCPs on how self-management support is currently delivered in asthma, cancer and stroke (content, communication, organisation of care), their needs related to self-management support provision, and envisaged solutions for improving current practice. Three different chronic conditions will be targeted: asthma, breast cancer and stroke. The qualitative data will be analysed via grounded-theory and template analysis. It will inform the development of a theoretical model of collaborative self-management support in chronic conditions. It will also result in three profiles describing 'real' versus 'ideal' care processes, which will represent needs assessment stages for future health services improvement interventions in the three conditions.