Self-Management Support is more than Patient Education

For more on introducing self-management support click “Continue to Next Page,” below.

Achieving a true partnership between “activated patients” and “prepared practice teams” will require new behaviors from both partners. Nowhere is this more important than in the area of self-management support. When patients began to come to visits with lists of questions and concerns in the 1980s, it sparked a debate in the “Letters to the Editor” section of the New England Journal of Medicine, with physicians weighing in passionately on both sides of the question of whether this was a good thing. Similar discussions have occurred regarding patient use of the Internet or bringing friends or family to visits. While these debates continue, it is clear that patients are arriving for care with raised expectations. As a result, providers are daily faced with a new paradigm. New paradigms often require new skill sets; supporting self-management clearly fits in this category.

Therefore, no matter the size or structure of your practice, team training is essential to enhance support for patient self-management. Training activities can be organized in several different ways:  as formal workshops; or more informally, via mentoring.

It is often best for provider teams to be introduced to  SMS and to learn key SMS skills in a group setting because most providers will need to make similar changes in attitudes and expectations.

Nourishing and sustaining changes in attitudes and expectations usually requires substantial changes in the culture of the unit or organization. Everyone needs to be on board. Therefore, a well designed kick-off meeting (which includes senior leadership) coupled with consistent follow-through and a good deal of ongoing training should be considered essential elements in any effort to develop solid organizational commitment to move in this direction.

In this section of the New Health Partnerships (NHP) Health Care Providers area, you will find a number of resources and training designs that have been fashioned to help providers learn about topics discussed at this website. But first we would like to share an example of the kind of presentation you may want to incorporate in such a kickoff meeting. Here’s why.

Sites participating in the New Health Partnerships program tell us that the challenge they face is how to go about introducing changes of this kind in a way that is consistent with what they are encouraging providers to do with patients. It is definitely more than simply giving providers information, under the assumption that knowledge in and of itself creates behavior change.

Alan Glaseroff, the faculty member who has been working with ‘Senior Leaders’ in the NHP Virtual Collaborative, has developed an approach to this based on work in his own setting, the Humboldt Del Norte IPA in Northern California. It should give you a bit of the flavor of one approach to meeting this most important challenge.

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