The increasing prevalence of chronic and non-communicable diseases imposes considerable burden on society meaning that the current acute biomedical model on which the healthcare sector is built is no longer suitable or sustainable . The burden associated with chronic conditions include poor health and wellbeing, non-adherence to treatment, ineffective resource use and adverse impacts on significant others are common among the lives of people living with chronic conditions . These problems can then maintain or worsen their condition, highlighting a need to target more than just the condition itself when providing treatment. With a primary focus on illness and disease, many opportunities for enhancing the health and wellbeing for people living with chronic conditions are being missed. By building individual strengths, optimism and resilience, within a supportive social network and environment, pathways to self-sustaining cycles of positive health and wellbeing may be triggered and maintained, supporting and facilitating ongoing clinical treatment. This would prove highly beneficial for both the individual, surrounding social network and environment, as well as better supporting the currently failing health care systems (NHS England, 2019). Critically, although there has been dedicated focus on pharmacological treatments for chronic and non-communicable conditions, there has been relatively little focus on non-pharmacological options . Non-pharmacological opportunities for people with chronic conditions are now briefly discussed below within the GENIAL 2.0 framework spanning individual, community and environmental domains.
Table 2: Potential interventions for people living with chronic conditions
Additional text for Table 2: in people living with chronic conditions relevant to individual, community and environmental domains.