A home for the science of self-care: launching the International Academy for Self-Care Research
Bangkok, 10 September 2026
Self-care is everywhere. It is present in the decisions people make each morning about what to eat, how to move, when to rest and how to manage their health. It is present when somebody recognises a symptom, takes a medicine, monitors a long-term condition, seeks advice from a pharmacist, uses a digital health tool, supports a family member, or decides that professional care is needed. It is also increasingly visible in health policy. Yet something important has been missing: an academic home devoted specifically to the science of self-care.
Today in Bangkok, we are taking a significant step towards changing that with the launch of the International Academy of Self-Care Research (IASCR).
IASCR was conceived as an independent academic institution dedicated to defining and advancing self-care as a distinct field of scientific enquiry. Its purpose is not to promote a particular intervention, profession, product or model of healthcare. It is to strengthen the scientific foundations upon which our understanding of self-care rests.
The launch of the International Academy of Self-Care Research (IASCR), Bangkok, Thailand, 10 September 2026. IASCR was established to provide a global academic home for the development of self-care as a distinct field of scientific enquiry.
Why does self-care need an Academy?
Self-care has an unusual problem. Its importance is widely acknowledged, but its evidence base remains dispersed. Researchers studying medication use may rarely interact with researchers studying health literacy. Digital self-management may sit in one literature, informal caregiving in another, lifestyle behaviours somewhere else, and traditional or complementary approaches in yet another. Public health, primary care, behavioural science, nursing, pharmacy, psychology, sociology, digital health and health economics can all be examining parts of the same phenomenon without necessarily recognising that they are contributing to a common field. The result is an evidence landscape that remains fragmented across disciplines, inconsistently defined and comparatively poorly supported by dedicated research infrastructure.
That fragmentation matters. Without common concepts, measures and methodological standards, it becomes difficult to accumulate knowledge across studies. Without stronger research networks, we repeatedly answer small parts of large questions. And without a clearly identifiable scientific field, self-care risks remaining peripheral to mainstream research funding even while governments and health systems increasingly expect individuals, families and communities to assume greater responsibility for maintaining health. IASCR has been created to address this structural gap.
Self-care as a field of enquiry
One of the founding propositions of the Academy is deceptively simple: Self-care should be studied in its own right. Too often, self-care appears in research as an adjunct to something else: adherence to a clinical intervention, management of a particular disease, uptake of a digital technology, or modification of a specific behaviour. Those are important questions, but they do not capture the whole phenomenon.
Self-care unfolds across the life course. It is shaped by capability, confidence, culture, family, community, commercial environments, technology, inequality, access to information and access to professional care. It may involve prevention, health maintenance, symptom recognition, self-management, self-medication, rehabilitation and decisions about when not to self-manage.
“The ambition is not simply to conduct more studies about self-care. It is to develop the science of self-care”
The founding documents of IASCR therefore deliberately position self-care as a complex phenomenon requiring behavioural, social, cultural, digital, traditional and equity-focused approaches. That distinction is important. The ambition is not simply to conduct more studies about self-care. It is to develop the science of self-care.
What should that science look like?
IASCR’s emerging research agenda begins with some fundamental questions. What exactly constitutes self-care? Where are its conceptual boundaries? How should self-care capability, behaviour and outcomes be measured? Which aspects are universal, and which are culturally or contextually specific? How do poverty, education, gender, ageing, multimorbidity and digital exclusion alter people’s capacity to care for themselves? Where does responsible self-care end and professional healthcare need to begin? How are artificial intelligence, wearables, diagnostics and other technologies changing that boundary? And perhaps most importantly: who benefits from contemporary models of self-care, and who risks being left behind? These are no longer peripheral questions. They sit at the intersection of prevention, health-system sustainability, population ageing, digital transformation and health equity.
Building infrastructure, not simply another organisation
The Academy’s proposed programme therefore extends beyond conventional networking. Its remit includes identifying global research priorities and evidence gaps; developing conceptual and methodological tools; supporting early- and mid-career researchers; convening interdisciplinary research communities; encouraging high standards of transparent and reproducible research; and translating robust evidence responsibly into policy, practice and public understanding. Among the activities envisaged are a Global Self-Care Research Observatory, an annual international research forum, open-access research tools and resources, methodological guidance, thematic reviews, international capacity-building activities and collaborative multi-country research programmes.
There is also an explicit commitment to global representation. The Academy’s framework recognises that a credible science of self-care cannot simply export assumptions generated in high-income settings to the rest of the world. Participation across regions, disciplines, cultures and lived experiences — including stronger representation from low- and middle-income countries — is therefore intended to be built into its development.
Why Bangkok matters
It feels appropriate that this next chapter begins in Bangkok. The Academy is being launched alongside colleagues working across Thailand, ASEAN, Australia, Canada, China, Brazil and the United Kingdom, bringing together perspectives on self-care that emerge from very different health systems and cultural contexts. The programme surrounding the launch deliberately moves between the global and the local: from the international state of self-care to healthy ageing, national public-health strategy, urban communities and the future of self-care within Thai society. That is precisely the intellectual territory that IASCR must occupy. A global science of self-care cannot be constructed from a single healthcare system, profession or worldview.
The next phase
Launching an Academy is the easy part. Building a field is harder. It requires researchers willing to cross disciplinary boundaries. It requires funders prepared to support questions that do not fit neatly within traditional disease silos. It requires methodological development, international datasets, stronger theory, reproducibility, genuine engagement with communities and much greater investment in research capacity. It also requires intellectual humility. Some of the most important questions ab out self-care remain unanswered — and some have not yet been adequately formulated.
IASCR therefore begins not with the claim that the field is complete, but with the recognition that considerable scientific work remains to be done. Its founding purpose captures the ambition succinctly: to define, strengthen and coordinate self-care research globally, while building the conceptual coherence, methodological development, visibility and international collaboration needed for cumulative science.
A new academic home
For decades, self-care has existed simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in academia: embedded across countless disciplines but rarely possessing an institutional centre of gravity of its own. Today we begin to create one. The International Academy of Self-Care Research represents a proposition that we believe is increasingly difficult to ignore: Self-care is too important to health, society and the future of healthcare to remain scientifically fragmented.
If prevention is to move upstream, if people are to be meaningfully empowered rather than simply handed greater responsibility, and if health systems increasingly depend upon what happens outside clinics and hospitals, then we need a much deeper understanding of the science that underpins those activities. That is the work ahead.
And today, in Bangkok, that work acquires a new home.
