PRESENTATION
The Central Catalonia Chronicity Research Group ('Grup de Recerca en Cronicitat de la Catalunya Central', or 'C3RG') is an consolidated research group recognised by the AGAUR (the University and Research Grants Management Agency of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia) (2021 SGR 01521), with the mission of generating new knowledge to offer a better response to the challenges for healthcare systems and individual well-being as a result of chronicity.
The C3RG is an interdisciplinary group made up of doctors, nurses, social workers, pharmacists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, methodologists, statisticians, health economists… and is also inter-institutional in nature, covering Primary Care (ICS and EBA units), Hospitals (Santa Creu Hospital Foundation in Vic, and the Vic Hospital Consortium, the Althaia Foundation and the Social and Health Care Foundation of Manresa), the University of Vic and El Bages University Foundation), along with professionals from other institutions in Catalonia, and international contributors.
THE CHALLENGE
We are faced with a demographic and epidemiological transition of a group of elderly people with a predominance of multimorbidity, many of them with advanced chronic conditions and illnesses, and complex care needs. Over the course of the coming years, this represents one of the greatest challenges for health systems: both for organisations and for social and health policy, which will be required to pick up the complex gauntlet resulting from the difficulty in responding to care needs and the corresponding treatment costs, as well as for health professionals, who will be called on to excel in addressing the complexity resulting from difficulties in decision-making, in and with such people.
2 CONCEPTUAL STRANDS
STRAND 1: from initial frailty to the situation of complexity and advanced frailty/chronicity. There is a continuum between these two situations, with different intermediate stages imposing different individual needs and different care focuses.
STRAND 2: from the population-wide view (the group as target and organisational models as response) to the individualised view (the person as the centre of attention).
4 LINES OF RESEARCH
The group has 4 Lines of Research:
In conceptual terms these are distributed as follows in accordance with the 2 strands described:
There are numerous opportunities to extend our understanding of each of these Lines of Research, as well as a range of options for collaborative efforts involving each of them.
ETHICS
All studies conducted by the C3RG research group are backed up by the respective ethics committees, thereby guaranteeing that throughout the process from conception, start-up and development of the activity, to the transfer of results and scientific presentations, ethical principles will be maintained.
With the aim of underpinning the commitment to ethics in research in the field of chronicity, the C3RG works with the Chair of Bioethics of Vic University-Central Catalonia University.
