Month: November 2018

CLAHRC researcher’s run half-term residential training event for second cohort of young commissioners

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Young Commissioners residential training for Dudley Council Integrated Commissioning hub, 2-4 November 2019

The “Young Commissioner” model – which sees children and young people work with funders and planners of local services to ensure they meet the needs of those in their age group  – is gaining traction among local authorities and the NHS.

CLAHRC North Thames child and adolescent researchers are training and supporting staff and young people based at Dudley Council, West Midlands to establish and embed the Young Commissioner model in their Integrated Commissioning Hub. This follows our work with a previous cohort of young people in East London to improve diabetes services.

Over the weekend of 2-4 November this residential event kicked-off the training programme for the young people using the principles of ‘learning by doing’. This has involved blending training with real-time commissioning activities.

The Young Commissioners worked with graphic facilitator Penny Mendonca on public speaking and presentation skills, and the different communication channels they could use.

Adult learners have also accessed project-specific eCPDs developed by the team to help them better align Council systems, structures and processes to optimise the impact and sustainability of this initiative. The adoption of the Young Commissioners model marks an area of innovation in how they work together with the public to commission children and young people’s services.

There is a strong commitment in Dudley Children’s Services to the active involvement of children and young people – the initiative forms part of Dudley Children’s Services Active Involvement strategy 2017, and the Children and Young People Market Position Statement 2018-2022.

“Dudley is a Borough where co-production with children and young people’s their rights are realised, and their views shape decisions made about their lives and those of their families.”

Dudley Children’s Services Active Involvement strategy 2017

Introduction to Economic Evaluation

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February 27, 2019 @ 9:00 am – 5:00 pm

Do you need to demonstrate the economic impact of projects in your organisation?

Do you want to assess the outcomes and sustainability of a new service?

Are you tasked with carrying out an economic evaluation, but don’t know where to start?

This one day, hands-on workshop aims to provide an introduction to addressing these challenges.  It is run by the NIHR CLAHRC North Thames Academy.  The course is aimed at staff in frontline services in the NHS and local government, who have limited experience of conducting evaluations and decision making analysis.

After attending this course, you will have the skills and knowledge to undertake your own simple economic evaluation of a local intervention or service, and be able to appraise other evaluations.

The course will cover:

  • introduce the basic principles of economic evaluation methods
  • explain how to assess the costs of an intervention/service
  • explain how to measure and value outcomes of an intervention/service
  • give practical examples of economic evaluation analysis
  • help to understand how to use economic evaluation in decision making
  • offer the opportunity to discuss in small groups the economic evaluation you are doing or thinking of doing.  A facilitator will help scope your economci evaluation, draft its core elements, identify the data you will need to use, think how you could overcome information or data gaps.

This workshop is suitable for staff from NHS Trusts, Local Authorities and CCGs who need to evaluate local programmes or services from an economic perspective as part of their work. It is not aimed at academics and/or researchers.

In order to be most beneficial for the participants, we invite applications from individuals who are carrying out or soon will need to carry out an economic evaluation of a service/intervention. In the selection process, we will give priority to applications providing a detailed description of such projects. Groups of people working on the same project are encouraged to apply.

No previous knowledge of economics is required (or experience of study design and statistics), however an interest in economics and being comfortable with numbers is desirable.

All participants will receive a certificate of attendance.

Cost – This course is free for staff working in NIHR CLAHRC North Thames partner organisations (please click here to see a list of our partners). There is a delegate fee of £250 for other attendees.

Registration – Please complete the registration form and email it to clahrc.academy@ucl.ac.uk by 5pm, Wednesday 19th December 2018.  

Please note, a cancellation fee of £100 will be charged to both partner and non-partner delegates in the event of non-attendance without notice after 5pm, Wednesday 20th February 2019

 

 

 

Evaluating a digitally-enabled care pathway for Acute Kidney Injury

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A new publication highlights our work in evaluating a new patient pathway with the potential to provide clinicians with real-time data on inpatients at risk of Acute Kidney Injury.

AKI is common (affecting up to 20% of UK acute hospital admissions);  associated with significant morbidity and mortality, and expensive – excess costs to the NHS in England alone may exceed £1 billion per year.

Researchers at the Royal Free Hospital (RFH), part of London’s Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust (RFLFT) have developed a digitally-enabled care pathway for inpatients, incorporating  a mobile software application – the “Streams-AKI” app – that “reads” routinely collected serum creatinine data in hospital inpatients and alerts health professionals where a patient is at risk of AKI.

We have published our protocol for this evaluation, and a postcard-style “need to know” summary – or BITE – of our research plans. We’ll measure its success for patients (in terms of speed and effectiveness of their diagnosis and care), NHS staff and clinicians (to find out what they think of the pathway) and for the NHS in terms of patients’ length of stay and costs to the service.

The protocol and BITE will interest NHS staff and clinicians working in renal care, as well as those interested in the potential of technology to improve detection and diagnosis via routinely collected data

Co-producing a ‘perfect’ care pathway for diabetes with young people

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We’ve been working with young people to transform how local health diabetes services are designed and delivered for their age group.

CLAHRC researchers based at the University of East London worked with local young people to understand the options and barriers they face when given a diagnosis of diabetes and using NHS services.

We recruited a mixed young research team – in terms of age, ethnicity, faith-identities and backgrounds – who worked together over one year to help commissioners and providers better understand and address the options and barriers of delivering a ‘perfect’ care pathway.

You can see the results of this work in our latest BITE – a postcard summary of a CLAHRC research paper.

This is part of our wider work to co-design community-based diabetic services responsive to the needs of children and young people

How do older people’s social connections influence their use of preventive health care services?

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Most of us have experienced the benefits of having strong and positive social relationships. We also know that a lack of these can lead to social isolation and loneliness – which are connected to illness and early death.

We know less about how social connections can influence our use of preventive health care services, such as screening, flu immunisation or health checks. Is it the quality of our relationships that matters, or how wide our networks are, or how often we are in contact with other people?

Our latest BITE – a postcard “need to know” summary of our published research – presents the findings of our investigation into whether and how social connections affect the use of recommended preventive health service programmes amongst people in their late 60s.

While it is common to target public health initiatives based on where people live or their economic and physical health circumstances, our work suggests using social connectedness indicators may also improve targeting of initiatives to increase preventive healthcare participation.

In addition, our results highlight the value of public health initiatives to increase social networks – itself a benefit beyond improving the uptake of services.

Projects

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Current projects:

Mental Health in Emergency Departments: variations in service and care quality in England

How effective was a programme to improve NHS orthopaedic care in England? Evaluating Getting it Right First Time (GIRFT)

NHS 111/Urgent Care Patient Relationship Manager Evaluation

Using MRI perfusion images to stratify brain tumours

Application of multi-state models to prostate cancer screening

Social Care Prevention

Exploring decision-making processes and knowledge requirements in public health

Effectiveness and acceptability of metformin in preventing the onset of type 2 diabetes after gestational diabetes in postnatal women: A feasibility study for a randomised, blinded placebo-controlled trial (OMAhA)

Effectiveness and acceptability of myo-inositiol nutritional supplement in the prevention of gestational diabetes: a pilot placebo-controlled double-blind  randomised trial (EMmY)

Prevention of progression to type 2 diabetes in women with gestational diabetes: A feasibility study for randomised trial on a Mediterranean diet

Improving the healthcare response to domestic violence (IRIS)

Improving the identification and management of people with HIV (RHIVA)

Completed projects:

Impact and experiences of delayed discharge: A mixed studies systematic review

Linking health and local government data at household level to understand social determinants of health