EULAR Recommendations

Quick View of Over-arching Principles and the 9 Recommendations:

Overarching principles

1. Self-management implies taking an active role in learning about one’s condition and in the shared decision-making process about one’s health and care pathway.
2. Self-efficacy (personal confidence to carry out an activity with the aim of achieving a desired outcome) has a positive effect on various aspects of living with IA.
3. Patient organisations often provide valuable self-management resources and collaboration between healthcare professionals and patient organisations will therefore benefit patients.

Recommendations (for a lay summary, see the above paper)

1. HCPs should encourage patients to become active partners of the team and make them aware of HCPs and patient organisations involved in all aspects of the care pathway.
2. Patient education should be the start point and underpin all self-management interventions.
3. Self-management interventions that include problem solving and goal setting and, where relevant to the individual and available, cognitive behavioural therapy should be incorporated into routine clinical practice to support patients.
4. HCPs should actively promote physical activity at diagnosis and throughout the disease course.
5. Lifestyle advice based on evidence should be given to better manage common comorbidity and patients should be guided and encouraged by their healthcare team to adopt healthy behaviours.
6. Better emotional well-being leads to better self-management; therefore, mental health needs to be assessed periodically and appropriate intervention should be made if necessary.
7. HCPs should invite discussion with patients about work and signpost to sources of help where appropriate or where needed.
8. Digital healthcare can help patients to self-manage and should be considered for inclusion in supported self-management where appropriate and available.
9. HCPs should make themselves aware of available resources to signpost patients to, as part of optimising and supporting self-management.

Hear what Prof. Iain McInnes (Past President, EULAR), has to say about these EULAR Recommendations

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These recommendations, based on evidence and expert opinion, confirm the beneficial effects of different components of self-management and provide guidance on embedding self-management interventions into the routine clinical care of people with IA. Importantly, this work also highlights the value of patient organisations in providing support and structured guidance for people with IA and emphasises the need to demonstrate and document the effectiveness of specific self-management interventions.