Chronic Disease Management

There is a growing epidemic of chronic disease in the UK due to tobacco use, unhealthy diets, physical inactivity and other risk factors. Whilst it is important to prevent these diseases from happening in the first place (which we are also trying to do – termed ‘primary prevention’), it is also important to prevent them from getting worse or causing other problems in patients who already have them (this is called ‘secondary prevention’). With good management of chronic diseases, people can live longer.

Offering good co-ordinated care that is in line with national and local guidance reduces the fragmentation of care and also reduces the risk of clinical error (including medication errors) and thus litigation risk. In summary, by optimising the management of a patient’s chronic disease, everyone is a winner.

A good example of this is diabetes – if you don’t manage a patient with diabetes properly, their diabetes will get worse, and over a number of years, they may end up with kidney failure, blindness, heart attacks, strokes, gangrene of the legs and so on which will result in being hospitalised.

If we treat a patient’s diabetes and get their sugars under good control, we can stop them from getting most of these things and reduce unnecessary hospitalisation.

Clearly, this is very good news for the patient (as it stops their lives from being hampered by illness, infirmity and disability), but it’s also good for the NHS in general because the cost of treating these  complications and subsequent hospitalisation would otherwise be very expensive.

Examples of Chronic Disease

  • Hypertension (high blood pressure)
  • Angina/Heart Attacks
  • Heart Failure
  • Strokes
  • Diabetes
  • Asthma
  • COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease)
  • Renal (Kidney) Failure
  • Osteoporosis
  • Cancer Care
  • Drug & Alcohol misuse
  • Mental Health Disorders like Depression, Anxiety, Bipolar disease, Schizophrenia and so on