Social care need in multimorbidity

Abstract

The growing burden of managing multimorbidity is a major challenge for contemporary care systems.1 As the population lives longer, more than two-thirds of those aged 65 years and over will live with two or more long-term conditions.2 People with multimorbidity experience multifaceted challenges, including functional decline, higher rates of disability, poorer mental health and reduced quality of life, in addition to the biological deterioration related to the presence of individual disease.1 Typically, people with multimorbidity have a disproportionally higher need for social care resulting from frailty, reduced mobility, housing problems, social isolation and economic instability, etc.1 These non-biological factors, which we refer to as social care need (SCN), affect personal independence and well-being. They are inherently linked to multimorbidity and associated with worse clinical outcomes such as mortality, hospitalisation, nursing home admission and healthcare costs.3 Science in this field has not yet elucidated the exact nature, direction or detail of these associations. Most research has focused exclusively on the biological aspects of diseases. SCN and its causes or consequences in perpetuating worsening or better health are not fully understood in multimorbidity. Moreover, a gap exists in the literature to explain sequencing and combinations of different forms of multimorbidity on individual SCN trajectories and traditional outcomes including all-cause mortality. To address these gaps, we first need to understand and agree on what is meant by SCN, including variations in terminology, interpretation and operationalisation that limit future research.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Glenn Simpson: orcid.org/0000-0002-1753-942X

ORCID for Hajira Dambha-Miller: orcid.org/0000-0003-0175-443X

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