Characterising acute and chronic care needs: insights from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019.

Summary

This paper, produced by the GBD 2019 Acute and Chronic Care Collaborators and published in Nature Communications in 2025, draws on the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 to characterise and differentiate the healthcare needs associated with acute and chronic conditions worldwide. It likely provides a framework for categorising conditions by care type and quantifies their relative contributions to disease burden using established GBD metrics. The findings are intended to inform health system planning and the prioritisation of acute versus long-term care capacity at national and global levels.

UK applicability

While the study is global in scope, its findings are applicable to UK health policy insofar as the GBD methodology includes UK-specific data, and the characterisation of acute versus chronic care burden is directly relevant to NHS resource planning and long-term conditions strategy.

Key measures

Disability-adjusted life years (DALYs); prevalence and incidence rates; mortality; healthcare utilisation or care need estimates by condition category (acute vs chronic)

Outcomes reported

The study likely quantified and compared the global burden of acute versus chronic conditions, reporting metrics such as disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), prevalence, incidence, and mortality across countries and regions. It may also have characterised healthcare system demand by condition type to inform resource allocation.

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