Category Archives: News

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Viet-Hai Phung presents at Emergency Medicine Congress, Lisbon

vhp2Viet-Hai Phung presented his work on the perceptions and experiences of Community First Responders (CFRs) in Lincolnshire at the recent Mediterranean Emergency Medicine Congress (MEMC). The Congress, organised by the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM), took place in the very smart surroundings of the Corinthia Hotel in Lisbon, Portugal from 8-10 September 2017. Despite the title of the Congress, this was a truly international conference, with delegates from North America, the Middle East, Africa and Australasia presenting.

Professor Lee Alan Wallis, Head of Emergency Medicine for the Western Cape Government, was the keynote speaker at the opening ceremony. He talked about the particular challenges of lisbon1emergency medicine provision in southern Africa, where in some countries the infrastructure is extremely basic. Other plenary speakers included: Professor James Ducharme from McMaster University in Toronto, who talked about the complex relationship between pain relief, patient satisfaction and addiction and Dr Eveline Hitti from the American University in Beirut, who spoke about the glass ceiling for women working in emergency medicine.

Viet-Hai presented the interview study that has been undertaken with colleagues Prof Niro Siriwardena, Ian Trueman and Prof Roderick Ørner on the first morning of the conference. The presentation was well-received with only minor points of clarification from the audience concerning the extent of their use in the UK and the levels of training they undertake.

What was interesting about the conference was the sharing of best practice from around the world on many salient problems in emergency medicine, such as alleviating patient overcrowding in the emergency department. All this within the setting of the wonderful city of seven hills, Lisbon.

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By Viet-Hai Phung

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Despina Laparidou presents Scaling up PINCER at ISQua 2017

IMG_0923Despina Laparidou, Research Assistant at CaHRU, together with Antony Chuter, a patient representative for Scaling Up PINCER (pharmacist-led information technology intervention for reducing clinically important errors) recently attended the International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua) Conference at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London (1st – 4th October 2017) and presented the preliminary findings of the Scaling Up PINCER project, funded by the Health Foundation.

IMG_1639The Main Conference offered a combination of exciting plenaries, short oral presentations and longer themed sessions, while poster and e-poster presentations were also presented throughout the duration of the conference. One of the most interesting sessions was the “A Mile in My Shoes”. A Mile in My Shoes is an interactive shoe shop that invited delegates to “(literally) step into someone else’s shoes and embark on a mile-long physical, emotional and imaginative journey to see the world through their eyes”. The session involved listening to, while wearing their shoes at the same time, unique audio stories from people working within health and social care, sharing their experiences and showing the remarkable contribution and challenges faced by those working in, and using, our health and social care system.

IMG_1634Despina and Antony gave their presentation on the morning of Tuesday 3rd October during a session on “Health Foundation Improving Quality in Community Health Services” and was very well received by the audience. PINCER is a pharmacist-led information technology intervention for reducing clinically important errors in medication management in general practices and the study’s preliminary results show early indications of improvement in most of the study’s safety indicators for gastrointestinal bleed, stroke, heart failure and acute kidney injury, but not for the two asthma indicators. The session, chaired by Will Warburton from The Health Foundation, also showcased studies, such as the “Ophelia Project” on improving health literacy for vulnerable people in the community, and “Making Waves” on Promoting a positive experience for people with COPD.

The Conference came to an end with Wednesday’s plenary and the promise to meet again in 2018 for an even more exciting ISQua Conference in Malaysia!

By Despina Laparidou

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CaHRU newsletter (Summer 2017)

CaHRU_logotypeThe latest edition of the CaHRU Newsletter (Summer 2017) was published in September 2017. The newsletter presents the work of the research centre over the previous three months and includes articles from the CaHRU blog covering publications, conferences and funding. The newsletter is written by members of the CaHRU team and produced by Sue Bowler, CaHRU administrator.

[su_document url=”https://communityandhealth.dev.lincoln.ac.uk/files/2017/09/CaHRU-Newsletter-Summer-2017.pdf” responsive=”no”]Multi-morbidity, goal-oriented care, the community and equity[/su_document]

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Spotlight on new ambulance performance measures

photo2italiccolourWORDSTwo key articles on development and prioritization of new ambulance performance measures were published this autumn 2017 in Health Expectations. The studies come from, Prehospital Outcomes for Evidence Based Evaluation (PhOEBE), funded by a five year National Institute for Health Research Programme Grant for Applied Health Research led by Professor Niro Siriwardena from CaHRU and Janette Turner of the Centre for Urgent and Emergency care research (CURE).

EMAS - A&E 6_750The first article, ‘Prioritizing novel and existing ambulance performance measures through expert and lay consensus: a three-stage multimethod consensus study‘ involved a multistakeholder consensus event, modified Delphi study, and patient and public consensus workshop, which together identified a shortlist of ambulance outcome and performance measures important to ambulance clinicians and service providers, service users, commissioners and academics.

N0030773 Paramedic driving an ambulanceThe final set of measures included change in pain score, accuracy of call identification, average response time, proportion of patients with a serious condition who survived to 7 days post-admission, death (within 3 days) from a low risk condition, proportion of patients transported to the Emergency Department who were discharged without treatment or investigation, and the proportion of those with specific conditions treated according to current guidelines.

The public consensus workshop, ‘A coproduced patient and public event: An approach to developing and prioritizing ambulance performance measures‘, was effective for obtaining public feedback on which ambulance performance measures were most highly favoured by lay participants. These measures have been developed to be used in future by ambulance services or commissioners to benchmark care quality between services or regions or to measure performance over time.

By Prof Niro Siriwardena