Month: December 2018
Using patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) for primary percutaneous coronary intervention
Introduction to Evaluation
Do you need to demonstrate the impact of projects in your organisation?
Do you want to improve the design and implementation of your programme?
Are you tasked with carrying out an evaluation, but don’t know where to start?
This one day, hands-on workshop, run by the NIHR CLAHRC NorthThames Academy, addresses these challenges. It is aimed at staff from NHS Trusts, CCGs and Local Authorities, who have limited experience of conducting service evaluations.
After attending this workshop, you will have the skills and knowledge to undertake your own evaluation of a local programme or service.
The course covers:
- Different types of evaluation, including their pros and cons
- How to select suitable methods and approaches for evaluating a local programme or service
- Practical skills and tips in using evaluation methods and approaches
- Ways of sharing your evaluation findings to make an impact
This workshop is suitable for staff from NHS Trusts, Local Authorities and CCGs. It is not aimed at academics and/or researchers. Participants should attend the course with an evaluation in mind that they may need to carry out. No previous experience of study design, statistics or evaluation is needed.
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 adelegate fee of £250 for other attendees.
Registration – Please complete the registration form and email to clahrc.academy@ucl.ac.uk by 5pm, Friday 1st March 2019.
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, Tuesday 26th March 2019
Requests for emergency contraception could be an important sign of abuse
Women who experience domestic violence and abuse (DVA) are more than twice as likely to seek emergency contraception as other women, according to a study by National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)-funded researchers at the University of Bristol and Queen Mary University of London, suggesting that requests for emergency contraception could be an important sign of abuse.
In the study, published in the British Journal of General Practice today, the researchers analysed medical records of over 200,000 women of reproductive age registered with a GP and found that those who had a record of DVA were 2.06 times more likely to have a consultation for emergency contraception compared to other women, rising to 2.8 times for women aged 25-39.
The researchers also found some evidence that abused women are more likely to seek emergency contraception repeatedly.
DVA is a major public health problem, with devastating consequences for the women who experience it and great financial cost to the NHS. It is known to have a significant impact on women’s reproductive health, including an increased risk of unintended pregnancy and abortion, as abusive and controlling partners coerce women to have unprotected sex or rape them.
Although emergency hormonal contraceptive, also known as the morning-after pill, is available from pharmacies, women can also get it from their GP. Up to a third of all emergency contraceptives are prescribed by GPs.
The researchers are calling for this new evidence to be included in existing DVA training programmes for GPs and sexual health practitioners, and for the training to be extended to community pharmacists, to help them identify and refer women who have experienced DVA on to specialist support services. Such programmes are recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and the World Health Organization (WHO) as part of a multi-sector response to DVA.
Joni Jackson, Research Associate from the NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research (CLAHRC) West and co-lead author of the study, said:
“We found a strong positive association between exposure to domestic violence and abuse and requests for emergency contraception. Our findings are in line with evidence from studies in other countries suggesting that women experiencing DVA use more emergency contraception than other women. GPs, pharmacists and sexual health practitioners are at the frontline responding to these requests, with community pharmacists dispensing 50% of all emergency contraceptive pills. This presents an important opportunity to identify women experiencing DVA, signpost them to appropriate support services, and potentially save lives.”
Dr Natalia Lewis, from the Centre for Academic Primary Care at the University of Bristol and co-lead author, said:
“The negative impact of domestic violence and abuse on health results in higher use of healthcare services by abused women compared to the general population. This means that healthcare services are an important point of contact for DVA victims and survivors. We have already seen improvements in GPs’ ability to identify and refer women experiencing DVA through the success of the IRIS (Identification and Referral to Improve Safety) programme. IRIS has recently been adapted for sexual and reproductive health services. Our findings support the case for adapting the IRIS intervention to the community pharmacy setting, although more research is needed to explore if and how this could be done.”
The research was supported by NIHR CLAHRC West and CLAHRC North Thames.
Papers:
Exposure to domestic violence and abuse and consultations for emergency contraception: nested case-control study in a UK primary care dataset. Joni Jackson, Natalia V Lewis, Gene S Feder, Penny Whiting, Timothy Jones, John Macleod, Maria Theresa Redaniel. British Journal of General Practice. 4 December 2018.
Use of emergency contraception among women with experience of domestic violence and abuse: a systematic review. Natalia V Lewis, Theresa HM Moore, Gene S Feder, John Macleod, Penny Whiting. BMC Family Practice. 26 September 2018.
