Multimorbidity refers to when two or more long term health conditions are experienced by a person at the same time, for example heart failure and diabetes together. It is associated with reduced quality of life and reduced life expectancy, and disproportionately affects people who are old and living in poorer households.
Multiple long-term health conditions create many challenges for the affected individual, their family and carers, and for healthcare professionals.
These include:
- co-ordinating multiple appointments in different healthcare settings
- managing potentially interacting medicines
- supporting people to stick to recommended lifestyle changes, such as giving up smoking
- mental health issues – anxiety and depression are common among people living with multiple long term health conditions
- negative impact on the health and wellbeing of carers
- higher dependency on emergency care
Given these factors, a co-ordinated approach is needed to identify key local issues relating to multiple long term health conditions, so we can better understand how to meet their needs using personalised programmes. These insights will enable improved healthcare systems and allow healthcare practitioners to work more efficiently with patients with multiple long term health conditions.
This theme will focus on multiple long-term health conditions across diabetes, cardio-metabolic and respiratory diseases and look at how we can modify behaviour and treatment to prevent as well as manage multiple health conditions
Our theme objectives
We will…
We will be successful when…
- Build on Leicester’s excellent multidisciplinary research into multiple long-term health conditions to bring together the expertise needed to lead this endeavour across the whole healthcare and academic system in our locality
- Conduct large scale observational studies to help us better understand the issues from the perspectives of patients, carers and healthcare professionals
- Explore how personalised approaches and self-management through wearable apps and other tools can engage and empower patients
- Investigate how multiple diseases and their treatments interact with each other
- Share our outputs in high quality, peer-reviewed scientific journals
- Link across other LAHP priority areas
- Integrate findings into our healthcare delivery system for the benefit of patients
- We have introduced risk profiling resources across our integrated health and care system
- There is better co-ordination of patient care with respect to multiple health conditions across healthcare providers in the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland system.
This will lead to earlier intervention, reduced time to diagnosis, improved condition management and increased access to preventative programmes. - Our shared best practice on a local level also impacts on national policy