MaxWELL in Pilot Practices (MaPP)

We have designed a new way of providing care in GP practices to people with several long-term conditions (LTCs), which we have called MaxWELL. It stands for Maximising Wellbeing in Everyday Life with Long-term conditions, because it aims to provide better support for people to live as well as they can despite their health conditions. It includes an annual review where a person can discuss everything to do with their health with a GP or nurse and make a care and support plan. The plan will be based on what the person says is most important to them and will include ways to look after their health that they feel able to do.

The MaxWELL in Pilot Practices (MaPP) study aims to find out whether MaxWELL reviews might be helpful to people living in deprived areas. People living in deprived areas often find it hard to get the heath care they need and their overall health may have got worse during COVID-19. This may be because access to health care has been more difficult and they may have had less support to look after their health. First, we will interview some people with several LTCs, who are patients of three GP practices in deprived areas in or around Bristol, where we will help to set up MaxWELL reviews. We will ask these people how they manage their health, what kind of support they would like and how their health has been affected by COVID-19. We will invite four patients to join a working group with the GP practice to decide the way MaxWELL is set up in their practice so that it is easiest for people to use it and benefit from it. This might include offering a choice of video, telephone or face-to-face appointment.

After a few months, we will ask some patients who are willing to be interviewed, what they thought of MaxWELL and whether the care and support planning helped them to feel supported in living with several long-term conditions. There will be short questionnaires for patients who have had the new type of review, to fill in if they want to, that will give us an idea of whether patients have found the new reviews helpful. We will also interview staff and collect anonymous information about how often people receiving the new reviews have needed a health care appointment, and whether measures of their health conditions have changed. From this information and from trying out the new reviews in the three areas, we will understand better how the reviews might help people who have several long-term conditions to get health care that matches what they need. From working with the GP practices and some of their patients we will also know more about the best way to set it up. This information will help to make the intervention as good as it can be before we test it in a much larger population in different places.

Amount awarded: £66,864