October 22, 2014 – 7:37 am
By Stewart Mercer, Chris Salisbury and Martin Fortin
The ABC of multimorbidity is a book (64 pages) recently published by WILEY Blackwell seeking to explore some important issues on the subject. Contributors to the book were Marjan van den Akker, Elizabeth A. Bayliss, Peter Bower, Sonny Cejic, Peter Coventry, Martin Fortin, Katie I. Gallacher, Linda Gask, Jane Gunn, Karen Kinder, Frances Mair, Carl May, Stewart W. Mercer, Victor Montori, Christiane Muth, Ignacio Ricci-Cabello, Martin Roland, Chris Salisbury, Efrat Shadmi, Moira Stewart, Amanda L. Terry, José M. Valderas, Concepción Violán, and Jonathan P. Weiner.
Divided in 12 chapters, the book addresses the prevalence of multimorbidity, its impact on patients, the relationship between physical and mental health problems, and how managing multiple health problems concurrently can create a heavy burden of treatment for patients. At the heart of the book is the authors’ shared conviction that health care should be person -centered.
Due to space limitations each chapter is rather short. We hope that experts on the subject do not judge us too severely for the limited amount of information we could provide, and that busy physicians looking for an informative and practical source of knowledge will find this book useful.
October 10, 2014 – 8:28 am
By Tom Brett
The General Practice and Primary Health Care Research Unit at The University of Notre Dame Australia, Fremantle has published a new paper: ‘Multimorbidity in patients enrolled in a community-based methadone maintenance programme delivered through primary care’ (1). The study is a retrospective cohort study using electronic medical record review of patients attending a primary care-based methadone maintenance clinic in Western Australia. The clinic itself is part of a much larger medical centre that offers comprehensive primary health care. Multimorbidity in the methadone cohort was consistently higher across all age groups and contrasted with the comparator group where multimorbidity was positively correlated with age. We found the traditional S-shaped distribution curve of multimorbidity from mainstream practice was replaced by a consistently elevated plateau distribution among the methadone cohort. Our findings suggest challenging implications for the design and delivery of health care services to this population. Diane Arnold-Reed is lead author.
1-Multimorbidity in patients enrolled in a community-based methadone maintenance programme delivered through primary care. Journal of Comorbidity 2014; 4: 46-54. Doi: 10.15256/joc.2014.4.42
