Lugano, Switzerland

Tackling the challenge of chronic illness from patient/family and health care organization perspective

The course will make visible what chronic illness management entails at the patient/family and health care organization level. More specifically, the course will address what it means for patients and families to live with chronic conditions and provide the basic principles on how health care providers can assist patients in behavioral change to adhere to therapies and to modify behavioral risk factors. Further we aim at providing the conceptual basis for organizational change towards models of chronic illness management that also include coordination of care and interprofessional collaboration within health care organizations. We will use examples of a variety of settings differing in available health care resources as well as type of patient populations.

Course leader

Prof. Sabina DeGeest and Prof. Dunja Nicca

Course aim

Managing chronic illnesses is the health care challenge for all health care system in high, middle and low income countries. This course addresses chronic illness management at the level of patient/family, health care provider (micro level) and health care organization (meso level). The overall goal is to learn how to reengineer and optimize care processes towards evidence based chronic illness management in different settings varying in health care resources.

At the end of the course, participants should:
- be able to critically discuss the epidemiology of chronic illness and its implications for health care delivery
- know principles and outcomes of chronic care models/approaches at the patient/family and institutional level
- reflect critically on patients and families involvement in reengineering chronic care approaches
- understand the basic principles of psychosocial and behavioural patient assessment and intervention and know how to integrate this on a program level
- understand interprofessional collaboration and coordination of care within the frame of chronic care management and know how to integrate such issues on a program level
- demonstrate skills in planning improvement of the care process for a defined chronically ill population and setting

Fee info

CHF 800: - Course fee
- Course material
- Lunches
- Coffee breaks at 10.30am
- Social events