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CaHRU students win top spots to present at SAPC Annual Scientific Meeting

sapcposterSeveral members of the Community and Health Research Unit have been selected for oral and elevator presentations at the forthcoming Society for Academic Primary Care Annual Scientific Meeting (SAPC ASM). This year’s conference will take place at the University of Warwick. The SAPC annual conference is the main international conference for primary care in the UK.

Dr Julie Pattinson will speak on her study, ‘Understanding reasons for variation by ethnicity in performance of general practice specialty trainees in the Membership of the Royal College of General Practitioners’ Applied Knowledge Test: cognitive interview study’.

Dr Zahid Asghar will also give an oral presentation on, ‘Performance of candidates with dyslexia in the Applied Knowledge Test for Membership of the Royal College of General Practitioners.’

An oral presentation will be given by Dr Murray Smith on the ‘Effect on hypnotic prescribing of a quality improvement collaborative for primary care of insomnia: a segmented regression analysis’.

CaHRU_logotypeDr Steph Armstrong will also speak at an elevator session on, ‘Ethical considerations in prehospital ambulance based research: an interview study of expert informants’, a study funded by the Wellcome Trust as part of the Network for exploring Ethics in Ambulance Trials (NEAT) project.

Michael Toze, will give an elevator pitch on his doctoral study, ‘Coming out in General Practice: the experience of older LGBT patients – his place ta the confernece was funded through the Best Oral Presentation Prize at the recent Trent Regional SAPC Conference hosted by CaHRU and the University of Lincoln.

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Finally, the abstract submitted by Joseph Akanuwe, research assistant and doctoral student at CaHRU, ‘Exploring Service User and practitioner perspectives of QCancer use in primary care consultations’ was among the top 10 highest scoring abstracts and will be eligible to be considered for the SAPC/North American Primary Care Research Group travel prize.

The whole team have done particularly well this year to be awarded oral and elevator pitches for all abstracts presented, but our doctoral students in particular have excelled.

By Niro Siriwardena

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CaHRU gives QI workshop at East Midlands Quality Improvement Network meeting

EFPC-logo-4-k new versionEast Midlands Academic Health Science Network hosted the latest East Midlands Quality Improvement Network meeting at Trent Vineyard, Nottingham on 17 May 2017 to over 150 delegates. The network has grown from the East Midlands Quality Improvement, Research and Education (ENQuIRE) Network set up as part of the HEI Challenge project between 2015 and 2016, led by the University of Lincoln. There were over 150 attendees at the event chaired by Dr Cheryl Crocker.

 

qin2017There were key notes from Richard Taunt, founder of Kaleidoscope Health & Care on ‘Bridging the disconnect between research and practice’ and Paul O’Neill, director of the East Midlands Leadership Academy on ‘Leading for quality improvement’. This was followed by an inspirational talk from Emma Wiggs, four time gold medallist Paralympian on ‘Improving mindset – improving quality’.

Professor Siriwardena, director of CaHRU then co-led, with Prof Bryn Baxendale of Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, a workshop session on Measurement of Quality Improvement. There were also workshops on human factors, safety and evaluation of QI projects.

QIlogoThe afternoon was devoted to a series of talks on Q, clinical audit and patient involvement in safety. The day ended with a discussion on next steps for the network.

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Nadeeka Chandraratne, joins CaHRU as an International Research Fellow

NadeekaChandraratneNadeeka Chandraratne joined the Community and Health Research Unit in May 2017 to work on the quality and costs of primary health care, as CaHRU’s second international research fellow.. She will study monitoring and evaluation of primary care systems in the National Health Service (NHS) and their applicability to low and middle income countries with high health standards, like Sri Lanka.

Nadeeka graduated as a medical doctor (MBBS with honours) from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo in 2006. She gained her Master’s (MSc) in Community Medicine from the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine (PGIM) of the University of Colombo in 2011. She also completed a Master’s degree in Development Studies (MDS) at the Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Colombo in 2013 and her MD in Community Medicine from the PGIM in 2016.

During her academic and professional career she has researched, published, trained and given invited presentations on a wide range of public health topics including child sexual abuse, premenstrual syndrome, gender-based violence, sexual harassment in workplaces, economic costs of tobacco and alcohol use, migrant health, child nutrition in communities and social health insurance for universal health coverage. She has won several national and academic awards and prizes for her publications.

sigiriya2Prior to joining our University, she worked as a Consultant to the World Health Organization where she was involved in preparing the WHO Country Cooperation Strategy for Sri Lanka and provided technical support to several activities including health financing for Universal Health Coverage.

She has also worked as a Consultant to UNICEF, and is an External Lecturer for the Department of Health Promotion, Rajarata University of Sri Lanka. She is also a member of the Expert Committee on Alcohol, Tobacco and Illicit Drugs and was the Secretary of the Expert Committee on Women’s Health of the Sri Lanka Medical Association.

At the Ministry of Health Nadeeka has worked in several capacities including as the Medical Officer of Health (MOH) in the most populated area in the country. She worked as a Senior Registrar in Community Medicine at the Gender and Women’s Health Unit, Family Health Bureau, Ministry of Health and a Registrar at the Department of Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine of the University of Colombo.

 

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Ravindra Pathirathna, international research fellow from Sri Lanka joins CaHRU

RavindraPathirathneDr. Ravindra Pathirathna joined the School of Health and Social Care and CaHRU in March 2017 as its first visiting international research fellow. Ravindra graduated in medicine from the University of Peradeniya and then completed postgraduate studies at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, in the field of medical administration where he gained his master’s and MD.

He has worked for 14 years as a medical officer in emergency medicine, health system manager and health care researcher. As a health system manager he developed experience in various fields of hospital and public health programme management. He worked as a hospital director in many secondary and tertiary care hospitals in Sri Lanka and worked as deputy provincial director of the health department in the central province of Sri Lanka. His main interests are in operational management, system development and quality improvement in health care.

gaullesunsetRavindra has published several research papers, for example in the Journal of Medical Administration in Sri Lanka, mainly in the area of health systems. These include: a study testing a new model of evaluation of health policy; interventional research using total quality principles and systems theory in inter-hospital patient transports; and workload assessment in health care administrative staff. He has also published in the fields of: cost evaluation of healthcare training; managerial approaches to waiting time reduction in clinical settings; interventions to improve clinical facility management; an epidemiological study on dengue in different climatic conditions and an evaluation of care in older people. He is a member of several academic associations in Sri Lanka including the College of Medical Administration of Sri Lanka.

During his visiting fellowship he will be studying the prehospital emergency system in the UK, mainly focusing on policy and operational background, ambulance service quality and clinical performance improvement. His main objective is to identify and develop an appropriate prehospital care model for a developing country such as Sri Lanka.

By Dr Ravindra Pathirathna

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CaHRU/LIH seminar: Causal models and Directed Acyclic Graphs – Professor Graham Law

Graham LawProfessor Graham Law, who recently joined the university and CaHRU as Professor in Medical Statitics, delivered the latest of CaHRU/LIH’s Implementation Science and Research Methods seminar series – on Causal Models and the use of Directed Acyclic Graphs. Professor Law set out the epidemiological context for the seminar. Epidemiology is the study of disease. The scientific methods used within epidemiology aim to discover the determinants of disease. The state of having the disease is the outcome. Causal models seek to examine the factors that contribute to this outcome. Causation is not usually dealt with by statistics. Instead, statistics concerns itself more with associations and relationships between variables.

dagA Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) comprises variables (nodes) and arrows between nodes (directed edges) such that the graph is acyclic, i.e., it not being possible to start at any node, follow the directed edges in the arrowhead direction, and end up back at the same node. In seeking to represent causation, DAGs typically display a series of factors, mediators and outcomes. Having explained this, Graham split the audience into two groups and challenged them to create their own DAGs to display all the possible factors involved in whether sunlight causes lymphoma. The interactive nature of the seminar engaged the audience. The fun nature of the concluding task made a potentially complicated subject easier for the audience to understand and apply.

By Viet-Hai Phung