About 40% of the Scottish population live with a long term health condition. That’s around 2 million people and the numbers are rising. Conditions such as heart disease, epilepsy, arthritis and chronic pain have an impact on just about every aspect of daily life – looking after a family, studying, holding down a job or keeping up with friends.
An important part of helping people to live well with their condition is enabling them to manage their own health. Self Management is a person-centred approach to better health and wellbeing, providing the tools, activities and information they need to manage their condition effectively and live a full life. To be confident and successful self managers, people require support and advice. Self Management support is usually provided close to home, sometimes by people who have been through similar experiences. You’ll often find good examples of support on your community centre or library notice board.
But it’s difficult to find on the web. Most current system have their own web sites, databases, online directories and lists of services. But this means there is duplication of information that makes it difficult to keep up to date. It’s also a great effort to find and include less visible services.
The ALISS project takes a different approach. We don’t intend to replace or reinvent anything. We’re not building another website. The ALISS Engine will link up current data and new contributions – including ideas from people living with long term conditions – to make a richer set of resources, openly available to all. We’re working towards a new national set of links can be used by everyone to provide better, more tailored local information and create new self management information services.
There’s a demo of the ALISS Engine at aliss.org - you can search the data that we’ve loaded so far…
