Highly Commended
TREAT TO TARGET UK: A professional education programme to drive Treat to Target implementation and improve outcomes for patients with rheumatoid arthritis across the UK
with support from Lucid
Summary of work
T2T aims to improve outcomes for patients with RA and prevent irreversible joint damage through clear direction on early treatment and tight disease control. In 2011, no agreed policies existed to guide UK T2T implementation.
Since 2012, we have collaborated with the UK T2T steering committee, led by Professor Paul Emery. Gathering stakeholder insights, we designed a behaviour-change programme to ensure disease activity is monitored routinely and used to inform patient outcomes.
Using a national audit to drive realisation of the need to change, T2T recruited >1,000 early RA patients; follow-up is ongoing. Beyond the audit, we evolved T2T to provide HCPs with knowledge, skills and tools to tackle the barriers to change and better implement T2T in practice.
“One of our greatest accomplishments is to achieve virtually universal acceptance of T2T, with >1,000 patients recruited ... By providing important outcomes data, the audit will inform the way we treat and manage RA and achieve the best outcomes for our patients.”
Professor Paul Emery, University of Leeds
T2T is now established on the UK healthcare agenda, and continues to evolve RA management through a targeted multi-stakeholder approach to improve service provision and — ultimately — outcomes for patients living with this chronic condition.
Judges’ comments
This multi-faceted audit approach has influenced national treatment standards for RA. AbbVie achieved comprehensive physician behavioural change, which has positively impacted patients.
