This section of New Health Partnerships gives information and resources for managing your condition and making changes in your life. You can find ways to work better with your family and with health care providers. You can learn self-care strategies that work for almost any condition. You can discover ways to cope with the ups and downs, overcome the barriers, and live your best, healthiest possible life. And more.

How will these skills help? When you have a chronic condition, staying healthy and living well depends in large part on healthy behaviors. For most of us, that requires change. Change doesn’t happen just because you want it to. It requires planning, support and effort. This is especially true when change must be sustained for a lifetime, as with managing a chronic condition.

According to nursing professors Juliet Corbin and Anselm Strauss, people living with long-term conditions face three difficult tasks. 

• Managing your health condition – things like diet, exercise, medications, treatments, self-testing and record keeping.
• Maintaining your functions and roles in life – being able to do the things you need and want to do.  Having the best possible relationships with others.
• Dealing with the emotional demands of your condition and life – especially difficult emotions like grief, fear, frustration, and anger. 

We are NOT telling you to make these changes alone. We encourage you to work with family members, other patients, and your healthcare providers. Most of us need support in changing lifelong behaviors. Physicians and healthcare teams need to learn new tools and skills to give this support.

The mission of New Health Partnerships is to support new ways for patients with chronic conditions and their families to partner with health care providers. Evidence shows that when patients and providers partner in self-management, both groups enjoy much better outcomes. In this section of the site, you will learn all you need to succeed at your side of this partnership.