The Self-Care Observatory (SCO) is an online platform dedicated to advancing self-care knowledge and research. The Observatory was officially launched during National Self-Care Week 2024.

The Self-Care Observatory was designed to support people and health and care professionals in accessing high-quality, evidence-based research on self-care practices, policies and innovations.

For individuals, SCO offers a reliable source of information to help them make informed decisions about self-care, empowering people to take more ownership of their personal health and wellbeing. For health and care professionals, the platform provides curated, peer-reviewed research along with other reliable reports that can enhance patient care, support self-management programmes and inform public health strategies.

“The launch of the Self-Care Observatory during National Self-Care Week is a signal moment. Because this celebration week highlights the importance of self-care in improving health and wellbeing outcomes, the Self-Care Observatory takes an important step by making the evidence behind self-care practices more accessible. In this way it gives people the tools to empower people to understand and manage their own health and wellbeing, while also enabling health and care professionals to integrate evidence-based self-care strategies and recommendations into routine practice.

Dr Pete Smith OBE, President of the Self-Care Forum UK

The initiative was spearheaded by the Self-Care Forum and is supported by a number of self-care experts and researchers including from the Self-Care Academic Research Unit (SCARU), The University of Southern Denmark (SDU), the University of Sao Paolo, the University of Technology (UTS), Sydney and the International Self-Care Foundation (ISF).

The Observatory is an open-source platform that conveniently curates collections of peer-reviewed research papers and other reliable evidence, with each subject area overseen by an international expert. SCO features up to 10 key papers per topic, with concise summaries and direct links to the full studies.

The need for an easily accessible Self-Care Observatory was reiterated at the London Self-Care Summit hosted by Imperial College London in 2023, where experts acknowledged a clarion call for a central repository of evidence for self-care research papers, case studies and international exemplars. This initiative aims to fill this gap by offering a living repository of scholarly papers that make the absolute case for the benefit of self-care for people and patients.

For more information or to suggest papers for inclusion contact Dr Peter Smith (p.smith@imperial.ac.uk or go to @SCObservatory on X)