Why is self-management important?
Personality disorder integrated care pathway
“The key to successful management of long term conditions lies in the hands of the person who lives with the conditions. People need the right information and skills to develop healthy responses to their conditions. Being told you have a condition for which there is no cure can have a devastating effect on a person, their values and beliefs. Individual people respond in individual ways and the impact of diagnosis will vary according to the effect of the symptoms on the person’s life circumstances. This includes social, economic, psychological, cognitive and cultural issues for that person, as well as the physical aspects of the condition. All of these factors can have a profound impact on a person’s well-being and self-esteem. People cope as best they can with the support they have but frequently they do not have the information or skills to develop healthy responses to their condition, or make well informed decisions about their life, let alone make plans for the future. To treat the medical condition in isolation from what is a much more complex human picture is reductive. It ignores the fact that ultimately the key to the successful management of long term conditions lies in the hands of the person who lives with the condition and their desire and ability to care about themselves.” (Gaun Yersel, 2008)
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.