PI: Prof E Maimela
Background and rationale
Multi-morbidity challenges existing healthcare organizations and research, which remains disease and single-condition-focused. The number of people suffering from multiple chronic conditions, multi-morbidity, is rising, and this is known to increase healthcare expenses through more frequent contacts, especially with the primary healthcare facilities. Lower quality of life (QoL) in an individual is associated with an increasing number of medical conditions. DIMAMO PHRC has collected data on multiple independently funded studies over the past years, and these studies had their own objectives. Although the results of these studies give a picture of morbidities around the study area, they only reported on some selected morbidities, but not linked to each other. There is therefore a need to link the data from the different studies conducted in the DIMAMO PHRC to understand the bigger picture of multi-morbidity in the area and work towards reducing the prevalence of multi-morbidity. Our ultimate goal is to assist the Government of Limpopo Province in understanding the burden of multi-morbidity in our study area and beyond then highlight that Patients with multimorbidity’s are at higher risk of safety issues for many reasons, including polypharmacy; more frequent and complex interactions with health care services leading to greater susceptibility to failures of care delivery and coordination; the need for clear communication and patient-centered care due to complex patient needs; demanding self-management regimens and competing priorities; more vulnerability to safety issues due to poor health, advanced age, cognitive impairment, limited health literacy and comorbidity of depression or anxiety.
Objectives of the study.
- Source and acquire all datasets of studies conducted in the DIMAMO PHRC
- Link the datasets using SAPRIN data as a baseline
- Use data management tools to analyse the data
- Use descriptive tools to relate the picture of multi-morbidity in the study area
- Use predictive models to predict future trends of multi-morbidity in the study area
- Prescribe possible solutions to reduce multi-morbidity in the study area
- Share the information with the primary health care system of the local area and the provincial Department of Health
- Engage the community on the findings of the study.