Co-creating Health

We are helping both patients and doctors to develop self management skills

Over 400 studies worldwide have shown that supporting self-management can lead to dramatically improved outcomes for patients. Despite this, it remains at the periphery of most health services.

The Co-creating Health initiative is a new self-management scheme that aims to transform healthcare for people with long-term conditions. Through this scheme, we are supporting ambitious healthcare organisations from across the UK to create new models of healthcare that embed self-management within mainstream health services.

Providing responsive, effective services for people with long-term conditions creates enormous challenges for health services. Healthcare professionals cannot address these challenges alone. Many people are ready to take a more active role in their own care, but they need to work in partnership with their clinicians to achieve lasting improvements in their health. This is what we mean by ‘co-creating health’.

We believe that to take a more active role in their health, people need self-management skills and easier access to information about their conditions. They also need skilled support and motivation from their clinicians and healthcare systems that operate very differently from those we have today.

What are we doing?

Under the Co-creating Health initiative, we are investing nearly £5 million to test how far self-management can produce measurable and sustainable improvements in health and healthcare. This includes an integrated package of support for a period of three years, delivered on-site and at national meetings by a team of experts.

The training and organisational development activities include:

• an advanced development programme for clinicians. This will help them develop the skills required to support and motivate their patients to take an active role in their own health 
• a self-management course for people with long-term conditions. This will help them develop the knowledge and skills they require in order to manage their long-term condition and work in effective partnership with their clinicians
• an organisational development programme. This will support patients and healthcare professionals, working together, to identify and implement new approaches to health service delivery which enable patients to take a more active role in their own health.

We are also providing fixed financial support to cover some of the costs of implementing the initiative, including locum cover for clinicians involved in training activities. In addition, teams will participate in regular events, where people will have the opportunity to learn from each other and hear from international experts.

Demonstration sites

The sites working on Co-creating Health are:

COPD

• NHS Ayrshire and Arran
• Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Cambridgeshire Primary Care Trust (PCT)

Diabetes

• Guy's & St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, Southwark Health and Social Care
• Whittington NHS Hospital Trust, Islington PCT, Haringey PCT

Depression

• South West London & St George's Mental Health NHS Trust, Wandsworth Teaching PCT
• Devon Partnership Trust, Torbay Care Trust

Musculoskeletal pain

• Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust, Calderdale PCT, Kirklees PCT
• North Bristol NHS Trust, Bristol Primary Care Trust

Further information

• Co-creating Health briefing paper >
• Co-creating Health - further reading >