Research Priorities in Chronic Disease Management

We’re really eager that this project reach as many relevant people with chronic conditions or those caring for them as possible.

If you are a person with a chronic condition, the family, friend, or carer of someone with a chronic condition, or a healthcare professional who treats chronic conditions in primary care, you can submit your thoughts now by clicking here.

If you are part of an organisation with a relevant audience, we are always open to new partners who could help us share our project widely. 

If you’d like to get in touch with us to ask a question or discuss possible partnership, please click here to send us a message. 

We are getting ready to launch our second survey, where we will be asking people who are managing chronic conditions* to rank a longlist of priorities for research in order of what is most important to them.

We have developed this longlist by summarising the responses we got in our first survey, where we asked for submissions of topics that people felt would be important for research to address. These responses were carefully reviewed and grouped together to create a longlist that represents all in-scope submissions without including duplicates. We are currently making final edits to this list and preparing the online survey to be shared.

*people managing chronic conditions includes those with chronic conditions, their family, friends and carers, and the healthcare professionals treating them

If you would like to read our project protocol, a living document outlining our plans, please click here. 

Chronic conditions are incredibly common, and the management of chronic conditions is a major demand on primary care. In Ireland, the total number of people affected by just the top 4 chronic conditions (diabetes, asthma, cardiovascular disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease [COPD]) is approximately 1 million. With an aging population, these numbers will likely increase in the coming years, as will the pressure on those affected and the healthcare system. 

Priority Setting Partnerships or PSPs are a prioritisation process developed by the James Lind Alliance, that brings together patients, carers, and healthcare professionals to identify and prioritise the unanswered questions they have about a specific topic. 

PSPs are led by a steering group made up of key stakeholders with direct experience of the topic, and they have responsibility for all decision making during the PSP. They decide how best to collect and collate unanswered questions, and then sort and categorise questions into a list ready for ranking. 

Final prioritisation happens in a workshop setting, where a Top 10 list of questions is decided on. 

This list is then championed by the steering group and promoted to researchers and research funders to encourage them to incorporate these questions into future research. 

The James Lind Alliance, named after James Lind, a pioneering Scottish navel surgeon who trialled the use of citrus fruits to combat scurvy in the 1700s, are an organisation funded by the NIHR in the UK. They support the use of the JLA method of PSPs, which aims to address the mismatch between research being carried out and research that patients and healthcare professionals want. 

Our partners are relevant organisations and interest groups who are helping us share the PSP with their members and through their communication channels.

We are hugely grateful to these groups for their involvement. If you’d like to find out more about each group, please click on their logo to be brought to their website. 

If your group would be interested in partnering with us, please click here to send us a message.