Lynne Craven - who describes herself as 'part-time patient, full-time person' - has used her experience of self-managing her own long term health condition to help shape a number of internationally recognised approaches. She has extensive experience of training and supporting people to run courses where health professionals and people with lived experience deliver programmes in equal partnerships.

In this presentation, Lynne shares her personal experience of self-management and how she built on that to being part of the team that developed and ran a highly effective evidence-based structured self-management programme that enables people with long term health conditions to develop the confidence to self-manage.

In the final session, Jim Phillips chairs a discussion on self-management and asks the presenters to answer questions from the audience.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people were forced to use online tools much more than before, or even for the very first time. Working and living online certainly has its disadvantages, but can also bring benefits, not least in opening up new channels of communication and access to resources, including in the field of health and social care.

Here, Nicolaj Holm Faber of the Danish Committee for Health Education asks whether digital communication, using online services and smartphones, could prove to be a valuable tool for early tracing and management of non-communicable diseases, giving several recent examples of projects and activities from Denmark. He introduces the 40-20-40 model of communication, where the balance of communication between patients and healthcare professionals is shifted away from the period of intervention to beforehand and afterwards to better frame expectations and patient evaluation of success.

The recording concludes with a discussion between Nicolaj Holm Faber, David Somekh and Jim Phillips, three friends and colleagues who each have a 15+ year perspective on attempts to transform the model of health care in Europe.

There is, as Kristine Sørensen of the Global Health Literacy Academy points out, a wide gap in access to healthcare between those who are privileged, educated and resourced, and those who are not.

But there are risks of stigmatising people in certain groups - whether they are women, elderly people, members of ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ or the elderly. Professionals often use labels such as vulnerable, marginalized or voiceless, but these are loaded terms with negative connotations, and may strip people of their dignity.

In this talk, Kristine reminds us that, seen from a different perspective, it is not the patients who are hard-to-reach, but the services. She explains how health professionals can address vulnerable groups and communities with dignity, with the aim of respecting their dignity and increasing their participation.

Dr Jonas Lander introduces the Hannover Patient University, which was founded in 2006 to transfer medical knowledge from the German city's Medical School MHH to the wider public, taking on a concept first developed in Colorado almost two decades earlier, and subsequently adopted and adapted by others.

The Patient University aims to improve health literacy and promote self-management of chronic illnesses. It runs lectures, seminars in schools, companies and in open classes, and now online, an especially popular format since the COVID-19 pandemic and a broader move to accessing services and information online.

David Somekh puts questions to the previous two speakers.

In this talk, Jim Phillips, the Network Director of CEmPaC, explores how to ensure that health and care workers have the competencies to work in partnership with people to help them to achieve the biopsychological outcomes that are important and matter to them.

How should health and care systems be designed in partnership with citizens based on principles of co-production, to enable person-centred care? An important starting point is shifting the mentality of healthcare workers improving people's health by "fixing what is the matter with them" surgically or medically, to working with them to identify "what matters to them" and identify the range of lifestyle changes that might lead to an improvement in their health.

Very often this is about reaching an informed compromise, built on the patient's personal choices and values. Jim explores the concepts of shared decision-making, supported self-management and personalised care and how these have been implemented in practice, which is often very complex and challenging but can be transformative.

Centre for Empowering Patients and Communities - CEmPaC - is a non-political, non-profit network. Our intention is to promote and develop the empowerment of patients and health professionals and inform policy makers on the benefits of patients and health professionals working in partnership to improve health and healthcare.

All of our resource materials are free of charge. We also offer tailored training packages for patients and health professionals, an online resource of the evidence of impact of patient empowerment and an ongoing series of webinars and a discussion forum.

"As a patient, you want your health care professional to work with you," says Jim Phillips, the Executive Director of CEmPaC. But what does that mean in practice? What can professionals do to improve their own skills in enabling others to manage their health conditions?

Dr Andrew McDowell is a psychologist, coach and leadership professional with more than 30 years’ experience of innovation in the health and care sector and one of the first providers to be assured by the new UK Personalized Care Institute. He is the founder of TPC Health.

Here, he explores the role of health coaching skills and how they underpin all interactions in health and social care with some practical tips. He introduces the TGROW Model for coaching patients to improve their own motivation to raise awareness and take responsibility for their own health, and demonstrates the process in a coaching session with Jim Phillips.

Jim Phillips of CEmPaC concludes the webinar on shared decision-making in health care by teasing out some of the common challenges, and looking for opportunities for improvements in discussion with the presenters.