Developing a Support Needs Approach for Patients (SNAP2) - Stage 1
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Accessing and delivering person-centred care in advanced non-cancer conditions: developing and piloting a Support Needs Approach for Patients (SNAP) with advanced COPD - Stage 1
IRAS ID
223429
Contact name
Morag Farquhar
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of East Anglia
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 7 months, 31 days
Research summary
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a long-term lung condition that shortens people’s lives. People with advanced COPD have severe breathlessness and face difficulties in daily living. We know that patients have unmet care and support needs in advanced COPD. We also know some reasons why. Patients’ contacts with the health care professionals (HCPs) are often brief and about responding to problems such as lung infections: they rarely provide opportunities for patients to identify and discuss their support needs. Even when there is time patients are uncertain what they can ask about. HCPs cannot rely on patients telling them their concerns unless it is a time of crisis. Providing appropriate care is therefore difficult.
If HCPs gave patients a brief tool to complete (a set of questions to consider), it might act as a prompt to patients to help them identify and express their support needs. The patient-completed tool could then be used by HCPs to start a conversation with the patient about their needs, and how they might be met. For now we are calling this new approach to identifying and addressing patient support needs the “Support Needs Approach for Patients” (SNAP). A similar approach, using a tool, has been developed for carers and is being successfully used in clinical practice nationally and internationally.
We developed the patient SNAP tool by working with patients with advanced COPD, their informal carers and clinicians. We now need to check that a range of patients can use the tool and that it can identify support needs (validity testing). We will do this by asking a small group of patients their views of the tool and then conducting a postal survey with 200 other patients to compare their answers on the tool to their answers on well-established measures of disease impact.
REC name
East of England - Essex Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/EE/0192
Date of REC Opinion
17 May 2017
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion