Chronic Illness

The first 200 words of this essay...

As our population gets older there will be increasing numbers suffering from chronic illness and disease. This focus and aim of this assignment is to discuss the challenges of this for both the health service and the individual. Perhaps the best place to begin is to consider how chronic illness has been defined.

There are many definitions of chronic illness some more expanse than others. It is characterised as a condition that requires ongoing adjustments by the affected person and interactions with the health system. The Centre for Disease Control's National Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (2000) broadly defines chronic disease as illnesses that are prolonged, do not resolve spontaneously and are rarely cured completely. Chronic illness may get slowly worse over time. It may cause permanent body changes to the body and it certaintly affects the persons quality of life (Locker 2003, cited by Scambler 2003).

Advances in public health, medical treatment and technology enable people to live longer lives. The longer one lives the more likely one is to develop a chronic condition. Premature infants who would have once died at birth now live. People injured in car accidents now survive, when