On September 9th 2011, the minor revision of the WONCA Europe definition of general practice included as its 12th characteristic “Promotion of patient empowerment and self-care”. There is a need to enable GPs to fulfill this specific element of general practice.

 

In order to create a structured approach in primary care to effective patient self management of chronic conditions, it is necessary to specifically assess which educational interventions aimed at health professionals in primary care produce improvement in effective self management by patients of their own chronic conditions. 

 

To identify studies which report on the effectiveness of educational interventions for primary care health professionals where the interventions were designed to improve self-management of chronic conditions by patients.

To inform the development of a template educational package (WP2) for primary healthcare professionalt across Europe.

 

Final Analysis and Write Up stage by ICGP June 2014.

Work Package 2: Development of the Evidence Based Summaries and Educational Framework 
 

An online course has been produced as a product of WP2 based on WP1 outputs. This consists of online access to slides including animated dialogue between patient and primary care health professional and links to two videos of consultations specifically created for this project, one between a GP and patient and another between a practice based/ community based nurse and the same patient (actor).

 

Publishing of this e-learning course/tool was possible using the authoring tools of Duodecim e-learning portal. 

 

This will be demonstrated during Wonca Europe Lisbon 2014 at the Wonca Open Forum Meeting and at the EQuiP Workshop on Patient Empowerment on Saturday morning 11.00. 

Further translation of the course into other languages is planned. 

Work Package 3: Evaluation of the online course for Patient Empowerment for Patient Self-Management of Chronic Conditions
 

To design a) an explorative evaluation (mostly focus groups or meetings) analyzing the data, supporting EQuiP to design b) a systematic evaluation of the self management package in different European countries, managing the pilot/the survey in German practices, to manage the data, analyzing the data, drafting papers. 

 

Core findings
597 respondents completed the survey (449 took the English eCourse and 148 used the German tool). 60% were GPs, 21% were GP trainees, 14% were medicine students and 5% had other professions.