Delivering Pulmonary Rehabilitation with Lay Health Workers (DRILL)

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Delivering Pulmonary Rehabilitation with lay health workers to improve life quality in COPD: feasibility study (DRILL study)

• IRAS ID

  155137

• Contact name

  Patrick White

• Contact email

  patrick.white@kcl.ac.uk

• Duration of Study in the UK

  0 years, 8 months, 31 days

• Research summary

  Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) is the most effective treatment for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), a common and serious lung disease caused by smoking. PR involves a structured course of exercise and education. It improves quality of life, reduces breathlessness, and improves exercise. It reduces readmission due to COPD. Despite PR's benefits less than half of COPD patients who are referred complete the treatment. COPD patients need help to overcome the obstacles to participation. Lay health workers (LHWs) - lay people who have received some training to promote health or carry out some healthcare services, but are not healthcare professionals - have improved the uptake of health care in a wide variety of settings including depression, HIV, and immunisation. We will test the feasibility of using LHWs to enable people with COPD to overcome the obstacles to completing PR.
  Many who do not complete PR point to barriers such as disruption to their routine, feeling PR will not benefit them, current smoking, and lack of social support. Our research found that many would welcome experienced patients’ input in overcoming the obstacles to PR. We will train people with COPD as LHWs so they can help other COPD patients overcome their barriers to PR. We hope that the numbers completing PR will increase from 40% to 60% through this intervention, an increase of more than 200 people benefitting in our area alone. We want to find out if our new programme is feasible. Can we recruit enough people with COPD to be LHWs? Can they be trained to deliver the programme? Will newly referred PR patients sign up for the LHW intervention? If we can do this, we will next seek funding for a randomised controlled trial of LHWs to increase the number of patients benefitting from PR in the NHS.

• REC name

  London - Westminster Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  14/LO/2313

• Date of REC Opinion

  10 Mar 2015

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion