People with long-term conditions make decisions, take actions and manage a broad range of factors that affect their health on a day-to-day basis. Development of self-management skills is likely to increase a person’s ability to proactively manage their own health, with benefits for quality of life, sense of control, confidence levels, and specific health outcomes. Individual clinicians, teams, services and organisations all have a role in supporting this process, as can members of a patient’s social network. Conditions for effective self-management are most favourable when patients, their social networks, professionals and organisations support the approach.

Self-management can take many forms and what helps one person may not work for another. However, time spent actively supporting, signposting or encouraging patients with personality disorder to self-manage frequently results in the person feeling more empowered to make well-informed decisions and more confident in their own recovery journey. This in turn increases the likelihood of longer term health benefits. Support for self-management may take the form of helping the patient access appropriate information, finding out what resoures are available in local communities, and developing specific skills of self-management. Clinicians, social network members, voluntary sector workers and others have an important role in promoting and supporting self management but the most important factor in any self-management plan is recognition that the individual is an active agent and central to the self-management agenda.