Stirling-led project aims to enhance NHS care
A new £500,000 project aims to ensure care decisions are informed by views and experiences
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A new £500,000 project led by the University of Stirling and Bangor University aims to ensure that decisions about health and social care services and patient care are informed by better reported research about people’s views and experiences.
The two-and-a-half year project will improve the way researchers use qualitative evidence from studies involving interviews or focus groups – which can explore and explain people’s behaviours, experiences and perceptions of health – to increase the likelihood that the research will be used by health and social care decision-makers and healthcare guideline developers, like the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and the World Health Organisation (WHO).
The project - titled PRISMA QES - is funded by the Medical Research Council’s Better Methods Better Research Programme. The project involves a partnership with leading academics from the Universities of Stirling, Bangor and Sheffield, who will work closely with an international group of experts.
Patient-focused
Professor Emma France, Professor of Health and Social Sciences in the Centre for Health and Community Research (CHeCR) at the University of Stirling, said: “We need to do more to encourage the use of information about people’s experiences of health services and care in decision-making related to improving health services in the NHS and globally.
“Evidence about which treatments and services work is important and already informs health services and policies, but to create high quality patient-focused health care, we also need to consider why and how they work and people’s experiences of using them.
“Pulling together evidence from many existing qualitative studies, such as those using patient interviews or focus groups, can shed light on factors like why patients, the public or health professionals, behave in a certain way or what it is like to experience an illness.”
The project will focus on the use of a group of methods called qualitative evidence syntheses (QES), which are used to combine information from a range of qualitative studies. These approaches enable researchers to find new insights and conclusions regarding specific health topics, such as the experience of living with advanced-stage cancer.
Urgent need
Joint project lead, Professor Jane Noyes of Bangor University, said: “A new reporting guideline is urgently needed to further improve the completeness and quality of reports that bring together findings from qualitative studies in a meaningful way. Cochrane and Campbell are global organisations that publish these reports, and they eagerly await the publication of the new guidelines to further improve the quality of the products published in their libraries to support global decision-making.”
The team will be working closely with the PRISMA Executive Group, who produce high-quality globally used reporting guidelines and the originators of various qualitative evidence synthesis methods, including Professor Angela Harden of City University of London, Professor James Thomas of UCL and Professor Andrew Booth of the University of Sheffield.
Professor France said: “Low-quality reporting of QES is common, meaning patient groups, NHS managers and healthcare guideline developers often lack trust in the findings and ultimately do not use them to improve decisions, policy and patient care.
“The PRISMA QES project will develop a guideline to assist researchers in carrying out quality QES and reporting them to a high standard, meaning this rich information can be used to create better decision-making and improve outcomes for patients and the public.”
The full title of the project is Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) for Qualitative Evidence Synthesis (QES), and the website can be found here.