www.health-on-line.co.uk Primary care trusts (PCTs) will now be able to offer more patients with long-term illnesses access to training courses designed to help them manage their conditions, ministers have announced.

A new social enterprise organisation established by the government, the first of its kind, will from this week provide self-management courses to patients suffering from various conditions in order to reduce their reliance on emergency medical care.

The move follows the government's decision to transform the existing expert patients programme (EPP) into a community interest company, with the aim of increasing the number of places available on self-management courses each year from 12,000 to 100,000 by 2012.

Early research into the effectiveness of allowing patients to better manage their conditions indicates that pressure on emergency health services could be eased as a result, with initial evaluations showing that accident and emergency attendances have dropped by over 15 per cent among those with long-term conditions who have attended an EPP course.

The Department of Health (DoH) says that PCTs will be able to commission the new EPP community interest company to run self-management courses for greater numbers of patients. This, it says, will help avoid unnecessary trips to hospital. It will also to train volunteers to conduct courses in their area.

Commenting on the new initiative, health minister Rosie Winterton said: "This is an excellent opportunity for PCTs to help patients in their local area to better manage long-term conditions."

"Knowing how to best manage a long-term condition reduces the need for expensive emergency care - this is better for patients and for the local NHS."

The chair of the new EPP community interest company, Stephen Jacobs, added that the organisation hoped to aim a number of its services at socially excluded patients and had designed a series of courses for minority ethic groups in nine different languages.

"It is particularly important to work with other health professionals to understand the value of our courses for their patients - a task which the EPP community interest company will also undertake," Mr Jacobs said.

This is cache, read story here