Exploring the potential of nurses in the delivery of care for people living with chronic conditions

People living with one or more chronic conditions is becoming an everyday occurrence. According to a recent report by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2013), 65% of all global deaths are attributable to chronic illness, with nearly 40% of those deaths being in people between the ages of 30 and 70 years old. Concomitantly, the cost of caring for people living with chronic conditions has placed an ever-increasing burden on health care budgets. This is because long term care requires the ongoing support of multiple services. The challenge for health services is to provide the optimum care possible for the least cost. To do this, one must understand that care is no longer just disease focused. Many health services lack the capacity to deal with such complex patients, with fragmentation of care commonplace, resulting in increased admissions and reduced capacity for patients to manage their condition, or have input into their care (Sheridan et al., 2015). The objective is to find new models of care that support an integrated approach to care that is communitybased and addresses the whole-person needs (Boehmer et al., 2018).