#13 Improving the lives of patients

To celebrate the Academy’s 20th birthday, we have put together a snapshot of 20 of our biggest impacts. To find out more about our 20th celebrations and our future plans, read this blog by our President Professor Sir Robert Lechler, and follow #AMS20 on social media.

The Academy would like to thank all our funders, partners and collaborators, without whom none of this work would be possible.

 

#13 Improving the lives of patients

“The Academy has done a huge amount of work to raise the profile of the millions of patients living with multiple long term conditions. Multimorbidity is a large and growing problem for society, with many people struggling, in part because the way we organise health and care services, guidelines and science is based around single diseases, not around the patient. The Academy’s report on multimorbidity has galvanised policy-makers, funders and researchers to ask, “What can be done to better serve these patients and their families?”

Professor Chris Whitty CB FMedSci, Chief Scientific Adviser for the Department of Health and Social Care

The lack of information about the growing number of people who suffer from more than one serious health condition led the Academy to launch the world’s first comprehensive review on the increasing global problem of multimorbidity.

Our resulting 2018 report highlighted the inadequacy of existing evidence to guide health policy and medical practice, and suggested a series of research priorities that should be urgently addressed. The report outlined a reporting framework to help ensure that all future research on multimorbidity is as complete and valuable as possible, and to accelerate its benefit. The report was developed by an international working group and was informed by two workshops in Johanesburg and London that looked at current evidence of the impact of multimorbidity on low and middle-income countries. The report launch achieved the biggest reach of any of our projects and was covered by almost every UK national newspaper. The report has been downloaded over 15,000 times and coverage reached an estimated 47 million people worldwide.

We subsequently held a workshop, drawing on the multimorbidity research priorities outlined in the report, to bring together researchers, policy makers and funders. This has already fed into the development of a joint funding call to help address multimorbidity in the UK context.

To find out more about our work, visit our homepage. To support the work of the Academy, see our dedicated Support us webpage.

 

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