Abstract

Background: Health services urgently need to deliver high quality services in a way that uses limited financial resources whilst simultaneously maintaining care quality & patient outcomes. Self-care support interventions for long term conditions (LTCs) constitute a core focus of this agenda & are designed to enhance children’s & young people’s (CYP’s) self-care capacities, reduce  healthcare utilisation and relieve financial pressure on healthcare systems & resourcing.

Aim/Method: We aim to identify and meta-analyse s the joint effects of clinical outcomes & costs of self-care support for CYP with long term conditions. We define CYP as <18 years old. We define self-care support as any health,social care or educational intervention designed to facilitate CYP (and/or adult carers) to manage their LTCs, promote self-care capacity and/or maintain or enhance health. We will include data from RCts, nRCTs, CBA & ITS designs. We restrict analysis to the subset of trials reporting quantitative data on both healthcare utilisation & health outcomes, so that we can assess the ability of interventions to reduce costs without compromising outcome. Healthcare utilisation will comprise data on hospital visits, admissions, primary care visits, other healthcare use, and total & other costs, including patient costs. Clinical outcomes will include standardised disease-specific outcomes, heath-related & generic quality of life.

Results: Findings will be available July 2016

Implications for practice: Successful completion of the study will help identify self-care interventions that could make services more efficient, while maintaining high quality care & good outcomes for  children & young people.