My Grandma and her self-management (Twin Blog with QISMET)

This is part of a twin blog with QISMET. Read the other part of this blog here.

We had my grandmother staying with us for Christmas, and I was lucky enough to help her celebrate her 92nd birthday just a few days later. She is very remarkable woman. She has brought up a family on a different continent, supported her local community, had a range of different jobs and has as my mother says ‘never lost her sense of curiosity and interest in the world around her”. Although since she now has arthritis, high blood pressure, eye sight problems, that world around her has shrunk somewhat.
Whenever I try to think about different people accessing the NHS as patients, I often think of her – how would Grandma cope or what would she make of this fangled new NHS initiative? I tend to come to the conclusion that we want very different things from our NHS and behave very differently as patients – call it the generation gap.

But spending time with her over Christmas after a few conversations in 2014 about self-management in older generations made me realize that we were quite similar after all as patients – we are both active self-managers!

Emails - a sign of trust?

I have the email address of my GP as his patient.
The people with long term health conditions that I work with as a self-management coach for the NHS have my email address and work mobile.

Although I am not working in a critical clinical role like a GP, I feel that being on both sides of the 'provider-user' fence on this one has given me some insight into to arguments about to give out email addresses to patients or not. It all comes down to TRUST.