b-Able2: programa de intervenção híbrida personalizada para a autogestão após AVC

Globally, stroke is a leading cause of death and disability. In 2016, stroke was the second largest mortality cause, with 5.5 million deaths. In Portugal, stroke affects around 15200 inhabitants every year and it is the leading cause of death. Moreover, people with stroke seem ill-prepared for the transition from rehabilitation services, increasing the readmissions and re-referrals to hospital and community services. Evidence and recommendation for providing self-management support after stroke, in countries such as the UK, the Netherlands, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, have shown that such investment leads to cost savings in the mid to long-term. Despite all the evidence, there are no known programmes of this nature in Portugal, which would represent not only a decrease in the use of health services, hospital readmissions and its related costs, but also an increase in the quality of life of people with stroke and carers. Our previous findings about the adaptation process after stroke have shown that Portuguese people with stroke and carers seem to maintain dependency on professional advice over time, not being engaged or encouraged to an active involvement throughout the rehabilitation process. Taking these findings into account, as well as the challenges provoked by COVID-19, this project aims to transform the healthcare services after stroke by designing a novel dyadic-centred and tailored blended care programme for self-management support. The final programme will be a blended care solution as it will smoothly and pervasively combine the traditional in-person intervention with computer-mediated support, which will be put into practice according to the context and the profile of the users. The programme is being designed to be adaptive, tailored to its users. According to each of its users, the programme will implement a digital transformation as much as possible and needed. Moreover, b-Able2 will provide an evidence-informed training for healthcare professionals in patient-centred and self-management support, which aims to change the professionals’ approach across the patient pathway and prepare them to implement the b-Able2 programme. The project will follow a user-centred research, which will allow us to involve not only people with stroke, but also carers and healthcare professionals in the design process. b-Able2 development is composed of four tasks, corresponding to three major phases: i) the integration of insights from the target populations: people with stroke, carers and healthcare professionals (task 1); ii) the iterative development of the programme, which is a blended care solution to support self-management after stroke, with participants’ feedback and professional training (tasks 2 and 3), and the evaluation of the b-Able2 programme (task 4). The main expected outcome is an interdisciplinary programme and training for healthcare professionals.