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23-27 June 2025 is World Wellbeing Week. This is a great time to consider how we align our health to our wellbeing considerations.
What is World Wellbeing Week?
Held in the last week of June, World Wellbeing Week is an annual event that was started in 2021 by Wellbeing World. They are an organisation devoted to championing personal, societal and corporate wellbeing through their various activities and memberships.
This week exists to celebrate the many aspects that encompass our idea of wellbeing. As well as factors such as social resilience and community relations, an understandably large part of our wellbeing is our mental, emotional and physical health.
Why is CELT celebrating World Wellbeing Week?
The Centre of Excellence for Long-acting Therapeutics (CELT), overseen by co-Directors Professor Andrew Owen and Professor Steve Rannard, is a multi-disciplined team of researchers working to create long-acting versions of existing medications. There are many illnesses that are either preventable or treatable but aren’t being prevented or treated even when patients access treatment.
Often the effectiveness of a medication is reliant on a heavy pill burden. This can be due to the volume of pills needed that are unmanageable for patients to keep up with. It can also be because some pills need to be taken at very specific time intervals, but daily life makes that unachievable. The need to take pills regularly and over long periods of time can have a dramatic effect on the wellbeing of patients, each pill being a constant reminder of their ill health and in some contexts carrying or taking pills can also be stigmatising.
How do our medicine regimens align with our wellbeing?
Pill burden in any form can place a huge strain on our wellbeing. Alongside the impact to physical health from missed or mistimed doses, there can be detrimental effects on patients’ mental health as well:
Mental fatigue
- It requires huge mental energy to keep up with the organisation required with oral pill regimens. From fitting in pharmacy trips, organising your day around the times they need to be taken, making sure pills are packed and fit into a daily schedule, to making sure one can take required medications into new countries we’re visiting.
Anxiety
- Some patients experience anxiety around accidentally missing doses of their medications
- Many patients are anxious about the stigmas that still exist around taking medications or the connotations of the illness they are required for. The more pills required the more likely the patient worries about their medication being discovered.
Providing patients long-acting options for their medications may provide some relief and potentially freedom from these burdens.
For some patients, an injection every one or two months would alleviate concerns and fit more effectively within their lifestyle than constant pill taking. Long-acting injectables can’t be forgotten, as there’s an appointment, but the energy that previously went into organising and remembering to take them can be used for more fulfilling parts of our lives. There is a lightness in not feeling tied to a pill regime and it would be great to offer that to more people worldwide.
CELT isn’t saying that long-acting therapeutics will be the answer to all our concerns around medications we take. We just hope that providing patients more options and choice for how they proceed with medication gives them back an element of control in their health. Autonomy within our health, an area where we can often feel helpless, is a huge boost to personal wellbeing and we’ll keep working hard to help facilitate that where we can.
#worldwellbeingweek