GP and nurse communication study_220517
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Clinical system-generated alerts to improve General Practice for patients with low health literacy and numeracy: a feasibility study
IRAS ID
227001
Contact name
Gillian Rowlands
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Newcastle University
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 8 months, 31 days
Research summary
‘Health literacy’ (HL) is skills to obtain, understand and use health information. We know that 60% of patients have low HL, and that many GPs have little understanding of the issues.
We have developed (1) a HL training course for clinicians and (2) a way for the GP clinical computer systems to alert clinicians when they see a patient who may have lower HL. We have combined these into an intervention which we think will improve clinician HL communication skills.
Before we go further it is important to run a feasibility study to see (1) whether our intervention is well designed, (2) which are the best ways to collect the information we need to evaluate the impact of the intervention in a future trial and (3) whether clinicians and patients can be recruited.
We will recruit 12 clinicians (GPs and practice nurses) from 4 to 6 to practices. The outcome will be patient rating of clinician communication measured with a telephone questionnaire. We will recruit patients who have seen the participating clinicians for a health condition review in the preceding 3 months (6 per clinician). After the intervention, we will interview a different 6 patients seen by each participating clinician during the intervention period. The outcome will be the difference between the average communication scores for each clinician (‘after’ score minus ‘before’ score).
After the intervention, we will run focus groups with (a) the clinicians who have taken part, and (b) service users to get their views on how parts of the project have worked, and how it could be improved.
Two patients are on our steering group and will help us to design the patient interviews and focus groups.
After this feasibility study, we will apply for funding to do a randomised controlled trial.REC name
London - City & East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/LO/1277
Date of REC Opinion
31 Jul 2017
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion