Bridges is a community interest company, founded in 2013 and built on more than 15 years of participatory healthcare research on how best to support individuals to self-manage their long-term conditions. We now work with hundreds of practitioners in health and social care teams across the UK every year to integrate and sustain Bridges principles into their practice.

Why did Bridges start?

Like a lot of innovations and research, Bridges began with curiosity and started by asking a question: “why do some people do better than others after their stroke?”. “Better” doesn’t mean recover full function, but we were curious about why and how some people who experience a stroke manage to get back to doing the things they enjoy, gain a level of activity and build connections again in their lives. Understanding the importance of how one person reacts and manages after a health event such as stroke formed the backdrop to how Bridges was developed.

Bridges began by exploring rehabilitation for stroke survivors. This curiosity about people’s stories led us to explore the power of relationships that can build capacity to self-manage. Over time we learnt that the most effective way to support self-management is to create a balanced, equal relationship that enables a person to do the things most meaningful to them alongside managing the ups and downs of their health condition. From there our work has broadened out. First, to support people after brain injury and major trauma. Now, we have worked with community, acute and primary care teams supporting people living with stroke, cancer, MSK conditions, with mental health conditions and learning disabilities, to name a few.

Bridges research has informed the best ways to support individuals living with long-term conditions to increase their knowledge, skills and confidence in managing their own health and care. We have identified the core elements and principles of effective, personalised self-management support, which together underpin the Bridges Self-Management approach.

We have carried on being driven by curiosity to explore what makes self-management support the most effective and we continue to be active collaborators in research projects across the UK and globally. Bridges has been used in New Zealand, Estonia, South Africa, Sweden, Portugal and the Philippines.

Since we launched in 2013, we have continued to test, evaluate and integrate the Bridges approach into health and care services. We have upskilled thousands of health and care practitioners across hundreds of health and care services in the UK and internationally in personalised self-management support, and built confidence to incorporate co-design into research and practice. In fact, we have trained practitioners in almost every patient-facing role in health and social care.

The co-design methods we have used in our testing and evaluation has continued to build our expertise in participatory research, experience and skills that we now use to support other researchers at any stage of their journey to build their confidence and capability to meaningfully incorporate people with lived experience into their work.

This work with health and care teams, and our ongoing wide-ranging research pipeline, has enabled Bridges to become a sector leader for self-management support for people living with long-term conditions, with an extensive evidence base.