Introducing IPCRG COPD Right Care
Personalised and safe care, delivering a better experience for people living with COPD
This year we have initiated the COPD Right Care programme that will follow the principles of the successful Asthma Right Care movement.
We use the concept of Right Care as explained by the Lancet series 2017: “the shared challenge is ensuring the right care is received by the right patients, in the right setting, at the right time, at the right cost.” We would add “in the right way”. The important point is to note that this means addressing both underuse of high value interventions ( tobacco dependency treatment and pulmonary rehabilitation) and overuse of low value or harmful interventions ( non personalised pharmacotherapy) .
As with the Asthma Right Care programme, our starting point is that education alone doesn’t solve variation and what is required is exploration of other factors in health systems such as different goals that drive different behaviours. The aspect that IPCRG believes it can impact most is the behaviour of those responsible for delivering the care. Behavioural change can be driven or hindered by capacity, motivation and opportunity. We selected a social movement approach to address motivation, by developing attention-grabbing content to disrupt and engage the participant. Once “kickstarted” by IPCRG it can nurture the voices of the diverse stakeholders in the system: policy makers, health professionals, patients and carers
This movement will ask everyone with an interest or role in COPD care to accept responsibility and commit to making a personal change in practice and also to influencing peers to commit to that change too. The attack on unwarranted variation can only be addressed if we strengthen our weakest links. To do this we will in addition to Right Care and social movements for health, we will include two other evidence-based approaches to effect change: achieving large scale change and followership. This combined approach will achieve what standard publication, education and advocacy programmes have not.
Development and testing of two novel tools to start new conversations and challenge the status quo in 2021
Key to the success of the Asthma Right Care project was the creation and development of tools that would enable behaviour-changing conversations between health professionals and between health professionals and patients. The main tool arising from the thinking and discussions of our multi-country and multi-professional delivery team resulted in development and then country adaptations of the tool we called the SABA Slide Rule.
For COPD we are bringing together a team of experts in primary care COPD to build and test new tools that will generate new discussions and changes in behaviour.
We will develop two prototype concepts with two clinicians from each pilot country – Brazil ( GEPRAPS), Portugal (GRESP), Spain (GRAP), USA ( COPD Foundation), a patient expert from the US COPD Foundation and a community pharmacist from the UK. Our four pilot countries will then test these products with colleagues and patients.
We look forward to sharing the results with you in Málaga 2022 and then to recruiting new countries to become followers of the COPD Right Care movement.