Gaining knowledge and skills empowers patients and enables them to take an active role in management of their often disabling lifelong condition, providing:
1. Skills to better understand the condition
2. Enabling self-management
3. Improve outcomes of the patient care & experience
4. Increased capacity of the services for headache patients, via better utilization and availability of scarce physician/expert resource,via regular regional Headache forums
5. Promotion of healthy lifestyle
The sessions have been run 3 monthly since December 2014, Chaired by me Dr Vanderpol Consultant Neurologist. There is not an headache specialist nurse in Cumbria, headache service is run solely by Consultant Neurologist. Many experts (headache specialist nurses, GPWSIs, consultants, dietary nurse, psychologists) from Cumbria as well from other regions of UK come to speak at the forums. It has been a great success, judging on the feedback from participants, patients as well as media coverage.
This concept combines pharmacological treatment with multidisciplinary non-pharmacological treatment and self-management, the aim was to create a comprehensive program to increase the likelihood of successfully managing headaches. This project started at region of Cumbria, however due to lack of access to headache clinic/experts in other regions, patients attending forums are often from far beyond the boundaries of Cumbria.
Main objectives are: 1. Improve access to the services and information, empowering patients to take an active role in management of their condition 2. Optimize medicines management via education of the patients and carer’s 3. Improve patient’s quality of life 4. Reduce unnecessary admissions for the patients with headache 5. Promotion of healthy lifestyle and prevention
The WHO estimates half of adults aged 18–65 years have had a headache in the last year. Chronic headache (15 or more days every month) affects 1.7–4% of the adult population. Migraine alone affects 12-15 % of the population. The WHO includes migraine among the 20 most disabling lifetime conditions. Headache disorders are a public-health concern given the large amount of associated disability and financial implications. Headache disorders are most troublesome in the productive years, estimated financial cost to our society from lost working hours and reduced productivity are enormous, in the UK 25 million working or school days are lost every year because of migraine alone.
It costs the UK economy over £3 billion per year in lost working hours (cost to our economy) and doctor’s visits (direct cost to NHS). Many patients do not receive appropriate care, most are solely reliant on over the counter medications and feel unsupported and abandoned. The lack of knowledge about headache disorders among patients, healthcare professionals and providers are the main clinical barriers. Only a small minority of individuals with headache disorders are correctly diagnosed and treated appropriately. The lack of awareness about different headache conditions and available treatments extends to the general public. Many might not recognize that the direct costs of treating headache are small in comparison with the enormous indirect-cost savings that might be made (e.g. by reducing lost working days) if headache services would be better designed and allocated.