These patients were using more self-management techniques compared www.selleckchem.com/ALK.html to patients with COPD and patients with musculoskeletal pain who showed improvements in 2 out of 8 domains. Where improvement occurred

most of the effect sizes were small. It has been argued that modest effects have public health significance when experienced on a population level [34]. Patients with depression had lower self-management scores at baseline compared to patients with the other three conditions and so had more opportunity to improve. Recent evaluations of the Stanford University, lay-led, Chronic Disease Self-Management Programme has shown improvements in depression and other health outcomes for people living with serious mental health conditions [39] and [40]. The finding that self-management

programs can benefit patients with depression and other serious mental health conditions is noteworthy. Mental ill health accounts for 13% of all lost years of healthy life globally, rising to 23% in high-income countries [41] and [42]. For most of the heiQ domains approximately a quarter of patients made substantial improvements, the check details exception being in skill and technique acquisition where more than a third reported substantial improvement. This is lower than reported by LTC patients in Australia, which showed that one third of patients showed substantial improvement in the majority of the heiQ domains [28]. The difference could be explained by the fact that Australian data were collected at post-course whereas our data were collected at 6 months follow-up and there may be some attenuation of effects. The questionnaire return rate at 6 months is lower than we have achieved in other self-management evaluations (e.g. 83% [34] and 80% [43]). PIK-5 We are unsure as to the exact reasons why this lower rate occurred and can only speculate that the pragmatic, real world design of the study, where greater emphasis and importance were afforded to implementation and delivery of the interventions rather than to the recruitment and retention of patients in the evaluation,

could have impacted on this. The main analyses on SMP completers (attended ≥5 sessions) present the most favourable estimation of outcomes as it focuses only on those patients who received a high dose of the SMP and completed baseline and 6 month follow-up questionnaires. ITT analysis showed similar improvements at 6 month follow-up, but were of a smaller magnitude. The biggest limitation is the lack of a control group, which means that there are alternative explanations for the improvements reported by patients completing the SMP. However, the size of improvements is generally consistent with randomized controlled trials of SMPs which are similar in process and content [9], [28], [34], [43] and [44].