How can BOOST help me?

Welcome to BOOST: Living well with Fatigue, Pain and Urgency in IBD.

We all experience difficulties in everyday life but having inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) can make some things more challenging. Continuing to experience symptoms of pain, fatigue or urgency when your IBD is in remission can be difficult and can prevent you from doing the things you want to do. BOOST can help you to take steps towards living better with your Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis. The programme is designed to give you the tools, skills and support to better manage your symptoms.

Your experience of IBD is individual and unique to you. We have designed the BOOST online programme, so it will personalise information relevant to you, making your journey tailored to your needs. Advice will depend on your responses and is aimed at making you feel better.

BOOST is made up of 12 online sessions (session 4 is split in two parts). We recommend that you do one session per week. As part of the standard package, you will have an initial 30-minute telephone call with a trained facilitator, most likely an IBD nurse, after you have completed Session 1 of BOOST. This way you get to “meet” your nurse (by telephone) and talk through your initial thoughts about the programme.

After the telephone session, while you work through the rest of the programme, you can get extra support by writing an online message to your facilitator using the Message feature on the BOOST platform. Your facilitator will aim to reply at a scheduled time during the week, so there may be a bit of a delay before you get a reply. The programme will also prompt you to see if you would like to send a message at the end of each session.

Your facilitator will be available to message for a period of 12 weeks after you have registered to BOOST. After this time, you will still have access to the BOOST website for another 14 weeks. Six months after you registered, your access will expire. We have set a limit to the time you can access BOOST, so that we can test if the intervention works within a specific time frame.

We look forward to supporting you. However, BOOST is not a substitute for your routine medical management from your IBD team or GP. During the programme your routine medical care will not be affected in any way.