ICARE4EU: Improving care for people with multiple chronic conditions in Europe

Abstract

Currently, an estimated 50 million people in the European Union live with multiple chronic diseases, which deeply impacts on their quality of life. Innovation in chronic illness care is urgently called for. First, most current care delivery models are disease-specific and therefore are not adapted to the needs of the growing number of people with multi-morbidity. Second, chronic illness care places a high burden on financial and human resources. The ICARE4EU project, a major new European initiative co-funded by the Health Programme of the European Union, wants to improve care for people living with multiple chronic conditions by identifying, analysing and disseminating innovative patient-centred multidisciplinary care programmes to address multi-morbidity.