Championing a ‘People Era’ in heart failure research

 

 

By Dr Alyson Huntley, Senior Research Fellow in Evidence Synthesis, Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Bristol

World Heart Day on 29 September 2022 aims to inform people that cardiovascular disease, including heart failure and stroke, is the world’s leading cause of death, claiming 18.6 million lives each year. It also aims to highlight the actions that individuals can take to prevent and control heart disease. Alyson Huntley describes how researchers at the Centre for Academic Primary Care are refocusing priorities to ensure that the needs of people living with heart failure are at the centre of their work.

We aim to put people with heart failure at the centre of our research. A recent collaborative project with other universities highlighted the unmet needs of people living with heart failure. The priority setting process brought clinicians, patients and families/carers together on an equal footing to … Read more

Involving people with advanced heart failure in setting the research agenda

Rachel Johnson

 

 

by Dr Rachel Johnson, GP and NIHR Clinical Researcher in Primary Health Care, Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Bristol

Together with colleagues at the Universities of Bristol, Oxford, Birmingham, Cambridge and Lancaster, I recently completed a James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnership for advanced heart failure, funded by the NIHR School for Primary Care Research.

Priority setting partnerships (PSPs) are an established method for involving patients and the public in the first, crucial stage of research – deciding which research questions should be tackled by research studies. The results have just been published in BMJ Open Heart and include a list of the final top 10 priority research questions.

Briefly the process involved:

  • conducting a survey to elicit priority questions from a wide range of stakeholders, including patients, carers and clinicians
  • excluding questions that had already been addressed in the literature
  • ranking the
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Involving advanced heart failure patients in shaping research questions: A Priority Setting Partnership

 

by Dr Rachel Johnson, NIHR Clinical Lecturer in Primary Health Care, Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Bristol and Anna King, NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Evaluation of Interventions at the University of Bristol

 

Our Priority Setting Partnership (PSP) began as the idea of a group of doctors who have witnessed how difficult the experience of heart failure can be for patients and their families. Heart failure is one of the commonest causes of unplanned hospital admissions, and it can place a heavy burden on carers and families.

Our aim was to put the needs of patients, carers and health professionals at the heart of the research agenda. We followed the methods of the James Lind Alliance Heart (JLA), a not for profit organisation set up to ‘open up discussion between patients and clinicians to agree on priorities for future research.

The PSP … Read more