The EMPOWER Project

Establishing new Methods to utilise Patient-reported feedback for Older people With multiple long-term conditions to increase Empowerment (EMPOWER).

Managing three or more long-term conditions remains a challenge primary care faces in terms of how best to support older people with enduring complex needs. We also know that patient empowerment can be difficult to measure and we still don’t know how this might look in practice.

Empowerment from the perspective of the older patient with multiple long-term conditions in primary care has been operationalised as ‘a process of growth that involves different degrees of control and information exchange in managing long-term conditions and social support networks’ as indicated by scores on the dimensions of an Empowerment PROM. Yet, little is known about the application of empowerment PROM feedback for patients with multi-morbidity in primary care.

The EMPOWER project led by Dr Nicola Small, funded by the NIHR School for Primary Care Research, aims to explore this by conducting early intervention work in partnership with patient partners and collaborators.

Aims and objectives

The potential for improving outcomes for older patients would add validity to any future intervention carer partner.

Carer partner
  1. Scope the literature on the effectiveness of PROM feedback to facilitate patient empowerment in multi-morbidity in primary care;
  2. Use co-design methods to explore the use of digital methods in PROMS measurement and feedback, to understand what supports or prevents their use in primary care, to inform the ingredients of a person-based empowerment feedback intervention.

Manchester researchers

Principal Investigator

Professor Dr Nicola Small, Division of Population Health, Health Services Research and Primary Care

Co-Investigators

Dr Brian McMillan, University of Manchester

Professor Peter Bower, University of Manchester

Professor Caroline Sanders, University of Manchester

Additional Universities/External Partners

Professor Carolyn Chew-Graham, Professor Joanne Protheroe, Primary Care Health Sciences, Keele University

Funder

NIHR SPCR

Funding period

Launching Fellowship, April 2020 to April 2021

More information

Download the research from ResearchGate

Read more on the National Institute of Health Research blog