Supporting Self-Management in NHS Primary Care and Neighbourhood & Community Services
Methodology • Workforce Training • Outcomes Platform • Independent Evaluation
Supporting self-management is essential for a sustainable NHS
How well people self-manage significantly impacts their outcomes, their reliance on clinical services, their quality of life, and more.
Know Your Own Health has contributed to the development of supported self-management in the NHS since 2010. Its work bridges policy, practice, and evaluation, helping to move coaching aimed at supporting self-management and patient activation from concept to operational, measurable implementation.
Our mission is to support the further development of knowledge around what works best, and most cost-effectively, for patients and the system in delivering support to self-manage.
Know Your Own Health enables the delivery of measurable support to self-manage at individual or system level
How self-management is supported
Support for self-management is delivered through coaching skills that build people’s knowledge, skills, and confidence to manage their health and wellbeing effectively. This is commonly measured as patient activation.
As one of a number of PCI-accredited providers, Know Your Own Health trains coaches in the NHS and neighbourhood and community services in skills to support self-management and increase activation.
Know Your Own Health also provides a caseload management and data collection system that supports any coaching approach where individuals are supported across a number of sessions to improve their health and wellbeing.
The platform can be used by individual coaches in any service or setting and enables coaches, services, and commissioners to collate and evaluate outcomes data, compare approaches for various cohorts of patients and conduct cost-benefit analyses, independently or in partnership with research organisations.
As a result, we offer a comprehensive, scalable model for individual coaches, GP practices, PCNs, neighbourhood teams, ICBs, and whole systems to support their patients and populations and achieve measurable outcomes.
Why we need to support self-management and collect outcomes data
Long-term conditions account for the majority of the NHS workload.
They also affect a person’s ability to work and participate in daily life.
Medical care can help in the management of long term conditions. However, outcomes and quality of life often depend just as much, or more, on a person’s confidence and ability to self-manage.
Strong self-management capability has been shown to significantly influence a wide range of outcomes. This includes clinical measures (such as weight, blood pressure, HbA1c), physical and mental health issues (such as sleep, fatigue, stress, low mood), and life outcomes such as the ability to work and engage actively with life.
Supporting self-management helps to prevent the development or worsening of long term conditions.
Monitoring outcomes helps ensure that supported self-management interventions, such as Health and Wellbeing Coaching, are:
delivering meaningful results for both individuals and the NHS.
tackling issues such as health inequalities and health literacy by ensuring the support is reaching all those who need it.
Nationally-available platform for collecting outcomes data
Know Your Own Health’s purpose-built digital platform for outcomes measurement and caseload management has been used to evaluate coaching within NHS pilot services since 2013. It was used to collect the data used in the evaluation of health coaching for people with long-term conditions and multi-morbidity published in BMC Public Health in July 2025.
The platform enables Primary Care Networks and other organisations to:
Measure patient activation and patient-reported outcomes (for any coaching approach, activity, or intervention designed to improve individuals’ confidence to manage their health and wellbeing in any context).
Capture consistent pre- and post-coaching data
Generate standardised reporting
Benchmark outcomes against comparable data
Produce raw data for commissioner- or researcher-led evaluation
Support cost–benefit and service impact analysis
Why outcomes data and evaluation matters
Coaching that cannot evidence its impact risks being underused where it could deliver significant benefit, or overused where it is not improving outcomes.
When supported by consistent, reliable data, coaching can contribute to robust evaluation and cost–benefit analysis, demonstrating how to maximise value for the NHS and wider public services.
High-standard professional training
Know Your Own Health delivers a high standard of professional training for Health & Wellbeing Coaches working in the NHS, as well as for those in other roles that are likely to benefit from supporting self-management and increasing patient activation as part of targeted interventions (e.g. Community Connectors, WorkWell Coaches, Social Prescribing Link Workers).
Know Your Own Health is one of a number of organisations providing Health Coaching training accredited by the Personalised Care Institute (PCI).
The PCI’s Core Curriculum of coaching skills must be included in any PCI-accredited health coaching training programme. Beyond that, coaches are able to use any appropriate coaching model. As a result, training providers vary in the models they incorporate into their training.
KYOH’s programmes:
Incorporate the Personal Care Institute’s Core Curriculum skills for Health Coaching
Include an evidence-based coaching methodology aimed at supporting self-management and increasing activation (the StACC model)
Align with national personalised care standards
The training is designed to scale capability across health systems, enabled by the simplicity and replicability of the approach.
A defined, evidence-based coaching methodology
KYOH’s accredited training includes the Structured Agenda-free Coaching Conversation model (StACC™), an evidence-based, replicable conversational framework designed to ‘activate’ patients, enabling them to build the knowledge, skills, and confidence to self-manage effectively and sustainably.
StACC is:
A simple but structured intervention.
Agenda-free for the individual.
Suitable for people with single or multiple long-term conditions, with very few exceptions.
Focused on measurable increases in patient activation, alongside improvements in outcomes and health service use.
Effective for people at all levels of activation, health literacy, etc.
In partnership with Imperial College London, the StACC model has been formally evaluated within NHS Primary Care with the results published in BMC Public Health in July 2025.
The evaluation demonstrated:
Significant improvements in patient activation.
Patient-reported improvements across a wide range of outcomes.
Strong participant-reported experience.
Reduced health service use.
Ongoing outcomes data continue to align with these findings.
Alignment with NHS and statutory sector policy
The collection of high-quality standardised data
The ability to conduct independent academic evaluation
Professional training delivered with consistency
A coherent self-management coaching methodology