What’s normal in children’s respiratory infections? Bristol parents helped us find out

 

by Dr Emma Anderson
Senior Research Associate
Centre for Academic Primary Care

As any parent knows, children get coughs, colds and ear infections all the time. Symptoms of these respiratory infections – including runny nose, cough and sore throat – can seem never-ending.

In the EEPRIS Study, led by Professor Alastair Hay from the University of Bristol’s Centre for Academic Primary Care, we recruited parents across Bristol to tell us about their children’s respiratory symptoms as they became ill. Gathering information in the community means we are able to find out more about common respiratory illnesses than when we study those who have decided to consult their GP. It also gives us a more accurate picture of how likely parents are to consult for these common illnesses, something which has been surprisingly unclear.

Two of our main findings were that:

  • it takes up to three weeks for most
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Why it’s important to pre-test patient-reported questionnaires

Insights from testing MYMOP and PEI

Dr Mairead Murphy

 

by Dr Mairead Murphy
Senior Research Associate
Centre for Academic Primary Care

In research studies, we use patient-reported questionnaires a lot to test if healthcare interventions work or not. Given that the correct completion of these questionnaires underpins our research conclusions, it’s important to know how patients interpret them.

We decided to look more closely at how people interpreted questionnaires. We asked people who had recently visited their GP to complete two commonly-used questionnaires in primary care and tell us their thought processes as they did this. The questionnaires we chose were:

  1. The patient enablement instrument (PEI): This questionnaire has six questions, all related to how “enabled” a patient feels following a GP consultation. It asks patient to rate their improvements in coping, understanding, self-help and other aspects of “enablement”.
  2. Measure Yourself Medical Outcomes Profile (MYMOP): This questionnaire measures symptoms, daily activities
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Medicines have revolutionised treatment in the NHS – can this progress be sustained?

Dr Rupert Payne

 

by Dr Rupert Payne
Consultant Senior Lecturer in Primary Health Care
Centre for Academic Primary Care

The seventieth anniversary of the NHS has made me reflect on how proud I am to have contributed to its work for over the past twenty-odd years. Founded on 5 July 1948, the service continues to this day to operate to the same three core principles – meeting the needs of everyone, free at the point of delivery, and based on clinical need.

Aside from providing comprehensive, high-quality healthcare services to virtually the entire UK population, the other thing that the NHS is known for is the constant political bickering that carries on in the background, with criticisms about chronic under-funding and stealth privatisation. However, these are not new issues, with medicines an important reason for the challenges the NHS now faces.

In a response to concerns about rising costs, perhaps the first … Read more

Collaborative action planning is key to person-centred healthcare but how can we make it happen?

by Cindy Mann
Senior Research Associate
Centre for Academic Primary Care
@Jcindymann


Person-centred healthcare
is accepted as desirable on moral grounds and because it potentially leads to better health outcomes, greater efficiency and less waste. It means both involvement of individuals in their healthcare and individualisation of care.

The NHS has been chasing the goal of person-centred care planning for several years and there are many good examples of innovation. The ‘House of Care’ describes what it might mean in practice for people with long-term conditions. At its heart is personalised care planning, taking account of patients’ expressed needs and priorities. The national new models of care programme, involving 50 vanguard sites, is also pursuing this goal and recently reported on lessons learnt. Many of the vanguards have invested in health coaching and communication skills training for clinicians.

I recently worked on a large research project, The Read more

Measuring outcomes in primary care

by Dr Mairead MurphyDr Mairead Murphy
Senior Research Associate
Centre for Academic Primary Care

With ninety percent of patient interaction with health services going through primary care, it’s not surprising that primary care clinicians and researchers try to figure out ways to improve primary care services. Interventions are many and varied, and result in important questions about their effectiveness. Do electronic consultations offer a good service to patients? If GPs introduce advice on healthy lifestyles into the consultation, does it make patients healthier? What about increasing the duration of GP appointments to ten minutes – does this improve outcomes for patients? Or ensuring that patients always see the same named doctor? Or painting the waiting room green?

Questions like these are normally answered by administration of a generic patient-reported questionnaire. By comparing the responses of groups of patients (say those with eight minute consultations and those with ten minute consultations), researchers can … Read more